This course focuses on the ways in which modernism shifted away from the Naturalism of Emila Zola’s novels and the Realism of ‘the painting of modern life’ and Impressionism into sensory subjectivity and the exploration of the unconscious mind, its dreams, phantasies, fetishes, anxieties and obsessions.

You will consider the emergence of psychoanalysis and the architectural designs for new sanatoria and explore interiority, intimacy, homosociality and the feminization of masculinity. The course examines the impact of the First World War and particularly its shell-shocked victims upon Dada, Duchamp and Picabia and the repurcussions of this War and its bloody aftermath with the November Revolution upon Dadaist gender subversions in Berlin, particularly through their cyborgization of men and mannequinized women.

Finally you will explore how new medical research into an array of neurological disorders, specifically schizophrenia, had repurcussions on Surrealists, particularly in imaging the uncanny and redefining beauty as "convulsive". By contextualizing these artists within these new discoveries of science and the medical aetiologies of sexology, neurology and psychoanalysis, as well as the traumas of war and revolution, this course aims to reveal the ‘other’ face of modern culture known as ‘Irrational Modernisms’.