This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

'Questioning the western tradition' introduces students to the notion of tradition, canonicity and artistic movements, showing how there is necessarily always crisis, flux and change in those categories and how analysis must respond to these changes. Thus, what is perceived as a continuum is really a constant process of change, tradition being then a category that is applied retrospectively and that can give a false sense of a stable centre from which culture is produced. The course will examine these questions in the context of French, Hispanic, Russian and German culture and examine how upheavals in the history of these cultures became assimilated into an apparently linear and continuous progression.