“Bizarre images hung on the enameled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role.” So begins JG Ballard’s novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970): this course explores those bizarre images, those insoluble dreams, so to define our own keys to the relation of art and violence in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The course is interdisciplinary in content and structure: students will encounter a range of materials in the visual arts, media, and literature from the historical avant-gardes to the present; course modules will focus on artists, writers, and curators contending with modern warfare, gross clinics of the medical sciences, empire and anti-colonialism, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, assassinations, industrial calamity, the War on Terror, surveillance and cultures of control, pandemics, and the “slow violence” of human effects on our planet, among other cataclysms personal and social. Linking case studies and course modules will be an ongoing examination of discourses on pain and its infliction, from the work of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon and Susan Sontag to Elaine Scarry and Anne Boyer. In all, students will attain a deep understanding and broad appreciation of aesthetic experimentation emerging from negotiations of power and violence in the modern era. Readings will be conducted in art history, media history and theory, literature, public policy, and the medical sciences. Film screenings and exhibition visits will enrich our investigations.