Metamorphoses: Mythic, Artistic, Scientific

• Introductory undergraduate General Humanities Course in English (adaptable as a graduate-level German course on theory and methods of cultural interpretation) • After taking this course, students will 1) be able to reflect on the interdependence of convention and innovation in mythic and artistic traditions; 2) gain a facility with interpretive methods common in humanistic study of cultural artifacts and media such as myth, literature, and visual art

Nothing is as fraught, flexible, and open to transformation as human identity. Myths, poems, and even scientific theories from Ovid to Goethe and beyond have attempted to come to terms with the vicissitudes of such metamorphosis: with its tendency towards instability and even loss of self, but also with its liberating potential to transgress constricting human limits. Beyond the realm of the imagination, we observe metamorphosis amidst the burgeoning diversity of nature, while we ourselves transform our natural environment through built structures. In this course, we will reconstruct and apply basic models for approaching the metamorphic interplay between radical transformation and obstinate persistence in mythic, artistic, and scientific traditions, examining in particular two fields of humanistic knowledge: the modern reception of Ovidian myth and the influence of natural-scientific ‘morphology’ on architectural aesthetics. How do ancient myths about metamorphosis themselves metamorphose in modernity? How did the study of natural forms such as microscopic radiolaria inspire the creation of artistic forms in early twentieth-century Art Nouveau architecture? And how should we understand such ‘epistemic’ metamorphoses in the first place?

Myths of Transformation, Transformations of Myth • Ovid, Metamorphoses (8 AD) • J.W. von Goethe, “The Metamorphosis of Plants” (1798); Faust II, Act I, III, V • Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915) • W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan” (1924) / H.D., “Leda” (1919) / Rilke, “Leda” (1907) • Theoretical Reading: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth.” From: Structural Anthropology (1963); “The Science of the Concrete.” From: The Savage Mind (1962)

Artistic and Poetic Afterlives of the Orpheus Myth • Albrecht Dürer, Death of Orpheus (1494) • Rainer Maria Rilke, Select Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) • Paul Celan, “Corona” (1952) • Ingeborg Bachmann, “Darkness Spoken” (“Dunkles zu sagen,” 1953) • Theoretical Reading: Aby Warburg, “Dürer and Italian Antiquity” (1903); “The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past” (1929)

From Scientific Knowing to Architectural Making: Natural Life-Forms as Art-Forms • Goethe, Excerpts from the Morphological Notebooks (1817 – 1826) • Ernst Haeckel, General Morphology of Organisms (1866); Art-forms of Nature (1899-1904) • René Binet, Porte monumentale (Exposition Universelle of 1900); Decorative Sketches (1902) • D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Excerpts from On Growth and Form (1917) • Christopher Alexander, “A City is not a Tree.” In: Architectural Forum (April/May 1965); The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building, “The Principle of Unfolding Wholeness & Structure-Preserving Transformations;” “The Morphology of Living Architecture & Archetypal Form” (2003-2004) • Theoretical Reading: Hans Blumenberg, Excerpts from The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966; on theoretical curiosity and the reoccupation thesis of historical change)