Getting a Good Start -- IFS 2021

  At the very end of our course, you will be writing a paper on the changes that occurred in Parisian society in the second half of the nineteenth century. To prepare you for that task and for much of the work that you will be doing at IU, we will be systematically introducing you to the tools that you will need to succeed in this project. To be sure that you are ready to get started on Day 1, I have created a pre-class assignment that you will need to submit by the end of Friday, July 23. Read over the material below, let me know if anything is not completely clear, and get to work on this project immediately. I hope that you will find the process enjoyable at the same time that it helps you develop skills that will serve you in your college career and beyond.

 

 

Your First College Assignment

 

  Like society today, Paris in the second half of the 19th century was marked both by rapid change and by a fierce effort to hold on to the past. To understand this tension between past the future, we will begin by looking at how this played out in world of art. Then we can move on to other aspects of the Parisian experience.

    History is about solving mysteries, so let's start by considering something that is apt to surprise us, when we consider Parisian culture in the period that we will be studying . . .

 

The Mystery of the Hostile Critic

   When we look back at late 19th century Paris from the perspective of the 21st century, we generally view it as the site of the one of the greatest cultural flowerings in human history. In particular, the painting of that period, including the works of the Impressionists, Van Gogh, and a host of other great artists, remains highly popular today.

  Yet at the time, many artists and critics and much of the general public viewed the new experiments in painting with such hostility that on at least one occasion guards had to be posted at exhibitions to protect paintings from being slashed by enraged visitors. Works, such as the painting by Monet at the right, were often seen, not only as the product of untalented artists, but as signs of the decay of all of Western civilization.

  Such a powerful reaction immediately raises a series of questions for those trying to understand this period:

  • What was the ideal for art that these be works seemed to be violating?

  • What factors in the system of producing and experiencing art may have predisposed many viewers to reject them?

  • What had occurred in French history in previous decades to make a large part of the population suspicious of change?

  Your first task in our course will be to look for answers to these questions in the assignment below.

  

 

Following the steps below should ideally provide what you need to know to complete these assignments.

But please email me at (dpace@iu.edu) if there is anything in the instructions or in the material we are studying that is not completely clear.

What is not obvious to you may be equally unclear to many of your classmates, and alerting me to the problem may allow me to clarify an important point for the entire class. (I will, of course, maintain the anonymity of the person who originally posed the question.)

 

Step 1 -- Click here to learn a bit about the French painter Gérôme and his career

 

Step 2 -- Click here to get a sense of the kind of art that Gérôme might have encountered

 

Step 3 -- Click here to complete the assignment (Due July 23)

 

 

  Step will be completed on Canvas, the online system that IU uses in its courses. This link will carry you to the assignment, where you can use your new IU user name and pass phrase to enter the system.

Please let me know if you have any difficulty getting access to Canvas

 

Pre-class Question

 

 

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