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Apr 19, 2024
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ENGL170B PO - Five American Writers Who Had a Problem with the Social SciencesWhen Offered: Last offered spring 2020.
Instructor(s): A. Kunin
Credit: 1
The social sciences have an account of art. What can art tell us about the social sciences? Ralph Ellison worried that sociology would reduce songs, jokes, and stories to culture, and reduce persons to data; his friend Albert Murray simply called sociology ‘the folklore of white supremacy.’ Hannah Arendt assigned artworks the important task of maintaining a space between individual persons to prevent their collapse into a mass of social stuff. Jane Jacobs believed that economists and city planners fundamentally misunderstood the aesthetic nature of markets and cities. George Kubler proposed to reassign the entire category of artifacts, ‘desirable things’ that humans make, from cultural anthropology to art history. These five twentieth-century American writers tried to redefine the concept of culture so as to make it useful for art and artists. The goal, in Kubler’s words, was to create a kind of renaissance, a ‘type of society in which excellent art inevitably and necessarily appears.’ Perhaps they lost that argument; the successes of sociological approaches to literature suggest that they did. In this seminar, we will run the test again. We will also consider some examples of social theory by Du Bois, Moynihan, Elster, Fields, and Patterson; some songs, jokes, and stories; and selections from Vico and Tocqueville, two earlier writers who would have loved the social sciences. Prerequisites: ENGL 067 PO .
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1; Writing Intensive
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