Quick—what time is it? Your answer probably comes from a smartphone that connects you instantly to information across the globe. New technologies drive new experiences of time and writers and artists respond to those new experiences with startling innovations in form and vision.

Through the critical study of art and literature, we will explore the experience of time in the modernist period—roughly defined as the first half of the 20th century. In those decades, airplanes, automobiles, telephones and radio sped up time and the modernists responded in kind. How did they experience time? How is this different from our own experience of it?

To answer those questions, we will not only study modernist art and literature, but also live like modernists. We will begin the fall quarter with a voyage, sailing the waters of Puget Sound on a 100-year-old schooner. We will slow down by using the technologies of the past. Students will write with ballpoint pens and typewriters, draw from observation and move into abstraction, use film photography, memorize poetry and go to museums, all in the hopes of living more slowly. During both fall and winter quarters we will study movements such as Romanticism, Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Abstraction and Surrealism in visual art and literature. Students will engage with authors like James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf and artists like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

Students in this program can expect to examine art, literature and culture in the modernist period; learn how to draw, paint and write in various ways from naturalism to abstraction; understand the basic principles behind artistic and literary representation in the modernist period; and go on field trips using "slow" technologies (train, boat, walking).