Essay

Write an essay of five or six pages in which you compare and contrast any two of the texts we have read (up to and including Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast) on the basis of their particular conceptions of the artist. As we have been stressing in class, each of these texts engages with the broad “modernist” project of reinventing artistic practice, artistic value, and the role of the artist in light of what was widely perceived to be the failure or bankruptcy of established artistic attitudes and institutions.  In some cases — in some of the manifestoes, for example — a particular idea of the artist is advanced quite explicitly and aggressively.  In other texts, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, an idea of the artist emerges more indirectly.  Indeed, this distinction between an explicitly declared artistic agenda and an implicitly represented one might in itself be seen as marking an important contrast in the way different writers conceived of the role of the artist.  But there is nothing to prevent you from choosing any of the texts we have read (or looked at; you may write about a painting if you like).