Art and society

Art and society

Axis and problematic

Art and society explores how artistic creation engages with — or escapes from — the social context. Problematic: To what extent does English-speaking art mirror, shape and challenge society?

Three relationships

1. Mirror — realist novels and social photography document society.
Examples: Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854); Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890).

2. Hammer — art reshapes ideologies and brings change.
Examples: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) — credited by Lincoln with sparking the Civil War; Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989).

3. Escape — art as refuge or pure aesthetic pleasure.
Examples: Romantic poetry (Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn); Aestheticism (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890).

Vocabulary

English	French
committed art	art engagé
pop culture	culture populaire
highbrow / lowbrow	culture savante / populaire
canon	canon
postcolonial	postcolonial
representation	représentation
appropriation	appropriation
patronage	mécénat
social realism	réalisme social

Movements

• Romanticism (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley) — celebration of nature and individual feeling.
• Realism / Naturalism (Dickens, Hardy, Zola translated) — social critique.
• Modernism (Joyce, Woolf, Eliot) — fragmentation of the self.
• Harlem Renaissance (Hughes, Hurston) — Black cultural assertion.
• Postcolonial literature (Achebe, Rushdie, Adichie) — rewriting empire.

Sample analytical paragraph

When Dorian Gray sells his soul for eternal youth, Wilde does not simply tell a Gothic tale — he indicts the Victorian obsession with appearances. The novel's lush descriptions and epigrams precisely embody what they denounce: art that delights and disturbs at once.

Problematics to remember

• Can art change politics, or only reflect it?
• In what ways has English-speaking literature been a battleground for identities?
• Is the canon a tool of inclusion or exclusion?