Although “alienation” might seem passé as a concept, modern art and literature were long steeped in this condition. This seminar will explore its principal expressions by its primary voices–artists, writers, and philosophers–from Baudelaire, Marx, and Manet through Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Gauguin, to Existentialist philosophy and outsider art, and on to “Black Dada” today. Among our themes will be the underground, spleen, dandyism, detachment, primitivism, art brut, absurdity, and objectification.
