Bag of Tricks

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I am what I am...

NOTE: This lecture is a work in progress. I may make small changes to the outline right up to the minute before I walk into class. If this text diverges slightly from what I present, that’s why. Revise, revise, and then revise some more is the name of the game in HCC students and lecturers alike However, the changes will not be significant, and this will be pretty close to what I present.

NOTE: An outline is not a lecture. If you miss lecture, you miss a lot.

Get ready for the first singalong today!!! It is 1889, you are a member of the working-class, and you want to be singing this song.

The Internationale

Can a maker ever NOT be a doer?

A new face on stage:

Hi, my name's Bob, and I'm a historian

My history as a maker of:

Standard Operating Procedure:

  • When the music stops, I start.
  • No paper friendly small font versions of the lectures, cut and paste, pop it into a Word document, and shrink the font. If you don't know how to do this, ask somebody who does.
  • Give me fifty minutes and I'll be sure to end on time.
  • If you talk to your neighbor in class, you are not invisible. It is distracting and inconsiderate. Don't do it.
  • If you're updating your Facebook, checking out the movie listings, emailing your friends or doing anything else except give me my attention during class, I will know, and I will haunt you. Give me 50 minutes and some respect. I'll try to fill the time with something of substance.
  • Shut off all cellphones.
  • The Social Contract: You work for me, and I'll work for you; you give me respect, and I will respect you.
  • Office Hours: No kidding, come on by. Or send an email. Email is my life's blood.

Research Alerts: Start thinking about the spring now! When you see the men in the white coats, it indicates a possible research topic. I've offered some suggestions of where you might begin to look for a topic for your spring paper. Defy expectations! Plan ahead!

  • Come to class: The outline is an outline. If you stay at home, you miss the riffs, the jokes, the songs.
  • But... if you're going to sleep, do it in your own bed.
  • Challenges! Be a lucky winner! See the webpage for my lectures or go directly to the Challenge page. Lucky winners will walk home with a genuine Soviet pin!
  •  

1. Challenge One: Write your Dada Poem! Deadline: 8:15 AM, Wednesday, January 30. Send me your response via email or put a hardcopy of your poem in my box in Murray Krieger Hall 200. Follow these easy instructions:

How to make a Dadaist Poem
(method of Tristan Tzara)


To make a Dadaist poem:

o                                Take a newspaper.

o                                Take a pair of scissors.

o                                Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

o                                Cut out the article.

o                                Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

o                                Shake it gently.

o                                Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

o                                Copy conscientiously.

o                                The poem will be like you.

o                                And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

-Tristan Tzara

Complete the instructions and email me the results or put them in my mail box in Murray Krieger Hall 200 BEFORE 8 AM on Wednesday, January 30.

Why disciplines make a difference

Different training, different methodologies, different books, different places we publish

German HISTORY
American HISTORICAL Review
Social HISTORY
Central European HISTORY
Contemporary European HISTORY
HISTORY & Memory
WerkstattGESCHICHTE (history workshop)
HISTORY Workshop Journal
Gender and HISTORY

Diacritics
Modern LANGUAGE Quarterly
Religion and LITERATURE
SHAKESPEARE Quarterly
Exemplaria
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
SPENSER Studies
Genders

 

We both play the same instrument

But we make very, very different music.

The Humanities is a big house with many different rooms. The Core Course allows you to visit many of them.

And if your discipline's not in the Humanities?

You are learning rules of specific disciplines. What rules does your discipline have? How do you learn them? Whom do you ask?

 

How historians read sources

Six Cs of Historical Understanding (with thanks to Nicole Gilbertson)

  • CONTENT: What's the main idea? Describe in detail what you see, read, touch, etc.?
  • CITATION: Who is the author? Who created it? When was it created?
  • CONTEXT: What is going on in the world, the country, the region, or the locality when this was created?
  • CONNECTIONS: How can you link this source to other things you know or have learned about?
  • COMMUNICATION: What's the point of view or bias? Is this source reliable?
  • CONCLUSIONS: How does the primary source contribute to our understanding of history?

And two more questions to ask yourself:

  • What questions do you have about this source?
  • What other information might you need to get a deeper understanding of the source? (Cliff Notes? Glossary for this and next week's readings. The first one's for free. The next one, you should create yourself. See Professor Moeller's Bag of Tricks.)

A way to organize your thinking; not every box can be filled, but why you can't know some things is sometimes as interesting as what you can know

Historical empathy: Thinking yourself back into a specific time and place

My lectures will emphasize CONTEXT. The meaning of a text depends on its context.

Juxtapositions: What else is happening and what difference does it make?

Why do I care about history? Relevance to the present. If it can't help me today, then why should I care?

What I want to get out of the materials I'll cover: Some big questions.

  • What is the relationship of politics to art and culture?
  • Can art NOT convey a political meaning
  • Who gets to make art? Who and what determines this?
  • Who is a "good" artist? (In the world of fashion, one day you're in, the next day you're out.)
  • Who gets to judge if art is "good"? (Nina Garcia of Elle Magazine? Top designer Michael Kors?)

The Program: Art and Politics Between the Two World Wars in Europe and the United States

  • 4 lectures on art, culture, and politics in Germany, 1918-1933
  • 1 lecture on why the Nazis hated everything you'll see and hear in the first 4 lectures
  • 2 lecture on opera in Stalin's Soviet Union (Viewing of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is required!!! Check schedule)

 

 

 

2 lectures on Gerorge Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (the assignment is the DVD; when you watch it, click the libretto in subtitles; this will give you all the words; the DVD is in the bookstore, and it can also be ordered from half.com or amazon.com)

 

 

Which brings me to hammers....

The tap, tap, tapping of the Rude Mechanicals

 

The tap, tap, tap of the mallet of the Renaissance sculptor

 

Smash, crash, boom, the hammer that levels and destroys

Hammers combined with sickles

The next 4 lectures:

  • Artists with strong sympathies for Communism
  • Artists who wield the hammer and believe that art is a weapon!
  • Artists who reject any division between makers and doers

Artists who fill traditional forms with explicitly political content

Agitational Propaganda/Agitprop Theater: Let's put on trial capitalists! heads of state! violators of human rights! the Director of the Core Course?

The Charge: She has forced UCI students to read:

  • Greek philosophy, NOT the history of slavery in ancient Greece
  • Novels about bourgeois love affairs, NOT histories of the patriarchal oppression in families under capitalism
  • Novels about African Americans that do not reveal the capitalist origins of the slave system
  • Plays by authors who believe that playwrights are better than workers and that make fun of the working class
  • Theories of artistic creation that do not realize that the powers of creation lie only in the collective, not the individual

Her Defense: These works are essential parts of a college education.

Our response: An education for what? Polite cocktail party chatter? Integration into a system based on social inequality and the myth of reward for individual merit?

How find you?

Her sentence: To read ALL the works of Aristotle and write a paper that reveals that they are nothing more than a pathetic defense of an oppressive social order

In the 1920s, no laughing matter

Friedrich Wolf, “Art Is a Weapon!” (CR, 63):
“[T]oday… genuine dramatists [cannot] continue to work in airless rooms or in the museum of the past; for them too ‘the scene becomes a tribunal!’ […] The stage becomes the court and conscience of the age!”

How do we get there from here? Filling in the CONTEXT

  • Figuring out what to include (sunspot activity? "Since the cooling of the earth's crust...")
  • Dare to omit! Choose what's essential
  • Essential for me
    • 1.European (particularly German) Socialism before World War I
    • 2. Intellectual and political impact of World War I on Germany
    • 3. The Russian Revolution (aka October Revolution, Bolshevik Revolution) of 1917

1. European (particularly German) Socialism Before World War I

  • Nineteenth century origins of Socialism: Marx and Marxism
  • Mass party in Germany before 1914
  • But limited political power despite plurality in parliament
  • Authoritarian Kaiserreich (Ki-ser-rike)/Imperial Government
  • Marxism as vision of inevitable future
  • Marxism as international movement.
  • And now for the first-sing-along, an exercise in historical empathy
  • It's 1889, we've come to Brussels for the meeting of the Second International, we are surrounded by our comrades, and we burst into song
  • The Internationale

2. But then there was World War I

  • International workers put on national uniforms
  • In Germany:
    • War of attrition, war of unprecedented levels of mass slaughter
    • War of domestic tensions, rationing, shortages, social conflict
    • War of political protest against war and splits within the Social Democratic party of Germany (SPD)
    • Independent Socialists
    • Spartacists

3. And in Russia, tensions that the war brings translate into revolutionary potential

  • February 1917, mass protests over food shortages
  • Lenin, a Bolshevik (= majority) returns from exile in Switzerland
  • Land, Peace, Bread AND "All Power to the Soviets!"
  • By October, inability of provisional government to solve Russia's problems creates opening for Lenin and the Bolsheviks
  • October Revolution: A model for Germany?

So what? Why do I need to know this?

  • Artists we study will all be influenced by Socialism and will identify with working-class movement
  • Artists we study will all be deeply affected by World War I
  • Artists we study will all support the Bolshevik Revolution and will split with the Majority Socialists to support a Communist revolution in Germany

Important reminder: Review Susan Morse, "Analyzing Images," Core Course Guide and Writer's Handbook, 116-9