Define “sublime” as the romantics used the term. Google paintings by the British artists J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. Using these images, discuss how the paintings reflect the sublime sensibility central to the aesthetics of Romanticism.
Why is it so hard for Augustine to change his life? What finally causes his return or conversion to Christianity? Is this reason satisfying to you?
As an epic journey to Hell and back, The Inferno clearly traces its ancestry, in part, to The Aeneid. As an “autobiographical” record of a spiritual struggle, it also has equally obvious roots in Augustine’s Confessions. Where do you see the influence of The Aeneid in Dante’s poem? Of Confessions?
Dada Manifesto and the google artwork by Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, and Giorgio de Chirico, among other Dada and surrealist artists. Explain how Dada and surrealism reflect the feelings of a culture gone mad after the devastation of WWI. If the ages of science and reason and industry led to the mayhem and suffering of that war, these artists asked, why should anyone have faith in logic, reason, or the beauty of art when life seems so arbitrary, desolate, and deranged? Notice how these artists prefer to explore the world of dreams and the unconscious than the surface world of objective, ordinary life.
Define “Realism” as a major art movement during the nineteenth century. Google images of Courbet, such as “The Stone Breakers” and “Burial at Ornans.” Courbet used to brag that he was known as “the first socialist painter.” Explain how Courbet’s paintings reflect the philosophy of Realism as a response to the Industrial Revolution.
