Media and Romanticism
German 597
Fall 2017
This course will examine the juxtaposition between the deterministic claims of contemporary German media theory and the poetic inwardness of Romantic writing. The course readings will commence with the early poetry of Goethe and Wordsworth, in order to consider how these authors struggle with the media technology of their own era as they seek to establish an autonomous poetic voice. The class will examine canonical Romantic literature to consider whether subjectivity is largely determined by cultural techniques and media technology? The course will also consider how late Romantics used media technologies in their own construction of poetic experience. How did communications media around 1800 address the Romantic desire for immediate sensations? Central to our discussions will be the concept of the “Romantic image.” Why did Romantics place such great importance on visual images as their ideal form of aesthetic perception? What is the relationship between the image and tone in Romantic writing about Beethoven’s music? To enhance our reflections, we will read recent media theories by Friedrich Kittler, Jochen Hörisch, Bernhard Siegert, Wolfgang Ernst, and Willem Flusser in relation to some of the most important literary works of German Romanticism (broadly defined): J.W. Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Bettina von Arnim, among others. Students taking the class for a grade will be asked to attend class regularly, participate enthusiastically, give one in-class presentation, and write a 20-page research paper.
"The Frankfurt School & the Politics of Visual Aesthetics”
German 591 Theory
Professor Daniel Purdy Fall 2016
dlp14@psu.edu
The course will examine critical theories by members of the Frankfurt School regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture. The course will center on German Marxist theories about how the rise of urban mass culture at the beginning of the twentieth century produced Modernist forms of visual representation. The course will examine how the spread of fashion-driven behavior had dramatic implications for aesthetic theory, film, architecture, and literature. The course will provide a survey of the most important works in the German critical tradition and the major thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. These include Georg Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, as well as the history of German Marxism.
Topics include the psychology of the metropolitan individual, the commodification of culture, money, and interpersonal relationships, the architecture of shopping, visual advertising through posters and photography, and cinema as a means of understanding social relations, as well as the role of visual media in public debate. The course will consider how modernist architecture, particularly from the Bauhaus school, redefined urban spaces and introduced new functionalist designs. The course will examine how Frankfurt School thinkers responded to the provocative design proposals presented by modernist architects. Students will examine specific modernist designs for consumer products to examine the relationship between the appearance of a commodity and its use, in order to understand how appearance and function are interdependent within modernism. In broad terms, class discussions will focus on such questions as: How does the relationship between the visual image and society change under industrial capitalism? What political functions do visual images have in consumer culture? What visual mechanisms does the “culture industry” deploy to organize public consciousness? What critical responses are available to visual artists within a mass-market economy? The course will provide students an historical understanding of early twentieth-century German consumer culture and its visual representation, while also offering them critical intellectual tools to understand the social and economic implications of visual images within consumer culture. The course will be taught in English with readings in both languages.
German 591 Theory
Professor Daniel Purdy Fall 2016
dlp14@psu.edu
The course will examine critical theories by members of the Frankfurt School regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture. The course will center on German Marxist theories about how the rise of urban mass culture at the beginning of the twentieth century produced Modernist forms of visual representation. The course will examine how the spread of fashion-driven behavior had dramatic implications for aesthetic theory, film, architecture, and literature. The course will provide a survey of the most important works in the German critical tradition and the major thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. These include Georg Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, as well as the history of German Marxism.
Topics include the psychology of the metropolitan individual, the commodification of culture, money, and interpersonal relationships, the architecture of shopping, visual advertising through posters and photography, and cinema as a means of understanding social relations, as well as the role of visual media in public debate. The course will consider how modernist architecture, particularly from the Bauhaus school, redefined urban spaces and introduced new functionalist designs. The course will examine how Frankfurt School thinkers responded to the provocative design proposals presented by modernist architects. Students will examine specific modernist designs for consumer products to examine the relationship between the appearance of a commodity and its use, in order to understand how appearance and function are interdependent within modernism. In broad terms, class discussions will focus on such questions as: How does the relationship between the visual image and society change under industrial capitalism? What political functions do visual images have in consumer culture? What visual mechanisms does the “culture industry” deploy to organize public consciousness? What critical responses are available to visual artists within a mass-market economy? The course will provide students an historical understanding of early twentieth-century German consumer culture and its visual representation, while also offering them critical intellectual tools to understand the social and economic implications of visual images within consumer culture. The course will be taught in English with readings in both languages.
German 581 Romantic Spaces Professor Daniel Purdy
TR 2:30-3:45 Spring 2013
Once upon a time, it was common to subordinate spatial relations to temporality. Time was considered the more fundamental quality of modern consciousness, both in literature and philosophy. Modernist literature was seen as concerned foremostly with the passage of time, memory and the unstable cohesion of subjectivity; only post-modernist writing was considered spatially oriented with its interest in commodity relations, globalizing capitalism, simultaneity and description.
This course will take a step or two back to investigate how Romanticism (broadly defined) constructs space in order to 1) organize interior feelings, along the axes of knowledge, sexuality, and power ; 2) establish a domestic terrain and boundaries for the nation state; 3) define differences between home and foreign spaces. Along these lines we will read Romanticism in light of theories of subjectivity, nationalism and Orientalism.
These three areas will overlap so that we will readily interpret the Orient as a space allowing for alternate modes of identity or the nation as an arena that incorporates ethnic, sexual and cultural differences. This course will also examine how literary texts represent the subjective experience of space. Literary depictions of space have long served as external reflections of interior states of mind. Thus our readings will lead us through ancient Italian labyrinths, psychic caverns, neo-gothic ruins, cartographic landscapes, broad boulevards, dark alleys, and bureaucratic compartments. We will also ponder the difference between the beautiful and the sublime.
Romanticism stressed the unique qualities of place. The poetic descriptions of natural sites such as the Rhine, the Danube or the Alps will receive our particular attention. We will study how literary texts construct the borders between Europe and the Orient while simultaneously arranging sexualities into heteronormative and queer spaces. All along the way, we will be reading some of the most important canonical texts in the Romantic tradition, in order to provide you with an overview of cultural history. We will also take a peek at key post-Romantic texts in order to understand better the contours of Romanticism. Authors include:
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Immanuel Kant Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Ludwig Tieck William Wordsworth
E. T. A. Hoffmann Heinrich Heine
Thomas Carlyle Samuel Taylor Coleridge
August von Kotzebue Thomas Mann
Franz Kafka Adalbert Stifter
Sigmund Freud Michel Foucault
Henri Lefebvre Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Caspar David Friedrich (painter)
TR 2:30-3:45 Spring 2013
Once upon a time, it was common to subordinate spatial relations to temporality. Time was considered the more fundamental quality of modern consciousness, both in literature and philosophy. Modernist literature was seen as concerned foremostly with the passage of time, memory and the unstable cohesion of subjectivity; only post-modernist writing was considered spatially oriented with its interest in commodity relations, globalizing capitalism, simultaneity and description.
This course will take a step or two back to investigate how Romanticism (broadly defined) constructs space in order to 1) organize interior feelings, along the axes of knowledge, sexuality, and power ; 2) establish a domestic terrain and boundaries for the nation state; 3) define differences between home and foreign spaces. Along these lines we will read Romanticism in light of theories of subjectivity, nationalism and Orientalism.
These three areas will overlap so that we will readily interpret the Orient as a space allowing for alternate modes of identity or the nation as an arena that incorporates ethnic, sexual and cultural differences. This course will also examine how literary texts represent the subjective experience of space. Literary depictions of space have long served as external reflections of interior states of mind. Thus our readings will lead us through ancient Italian labyrinths, psychic caverns, neo-gothic ruins, cartographic landscapes, broad boulevards, dark alleys, and bureaucratic compartments. We will also ponder the difference between the beautiful and the sublime.
Romanticism stressed the unique qualities of place. The poetic descriptions of natural sites such as the Rhine, the Danube or the Alps will receive our particular attention. We will study how literary texts construct the borders between Europe and the Orient while simultaneously arranging sexualities into heteronormative and queer spaces. All along the way, we will be reading some of the most important canonical texts in the Romantic tradition, in order to provide you with an overview of cultural history. We will also take a peek at key post-Romantic texts in order to understand better the contours of Romanticism. Authors include:
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Immanuel Kant Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Ludwig Tieck William Wordsworth
E. T. A. Hoffmann Heinrich Heine
Thomas Carlyle Samuel Taylor Coleridge
August von Kotzebue Thomas Mann
Franz Kafka Adalbert Stifter
Sigmund Freud Michel Foucault
Henri Lefebvre Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Caspar David Friedrich (painter)
Metropolitan Modernisms, Spring 2012
This course will interpret literature, film, architecture and theory from the last 150 years in order to examine the production of spaces within modern metropoli, concentrating fore mostly on Berlin, with additional texts and films about Paris, New York, Beijing and Shanghai. We will ask questions such as: How do places within a city acquire a specific ethnic, sexual, political or economic meaning? What artistic techniques represent the experience of street life best? How important are urban spaces for the operation of a political public sphere? What does it mean to “occupy” a place?
Our approach will compare modern industrial cities to one another. We will first trace the formation of Berlin modernist aesthetics and then consider its global legacy in the 21st century. Paris and Moscow will be important to understanding the modernism of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. New York, Chicago, Beijing, and Shanghai will mark different stages in the diffusion of this early twentieth-century Modernism. We will read German texts in relation to foreign cities. We consider the implications of Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project) and Siegfried Kracauer (Straßen in Berlin) fascination for Paris. New York and Chicago will be discussed in regards to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Bauhaus architecture of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Spaces marked in terms of alternative sexualities will be considered in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Magus Hirschfeld’s Transvestiten and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. We will read film theory on montage and the experience of urban streets, drawing connections between Russian revolutionary cinema and modernist experimental prose (Döblin and Musil). Our readings will survey theories of urbanity from Georg Simmel to Rem Koolhaas, Marc Augé, and Ackbar Abbas. Finally we will conclude with contemporary discussions of “the European city” as a reaction against globalization generally and the example of China’s rapid urbanization specifically. We will discuss the places of historical preservation and memorialization in Berlin and Beijing by considering Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin. By way of contrast we will consider architectural debates about preserving traditional urban spaces in China and contemporary Chinese films such as Ning Ying’s I love Beijing. |
German Orientalism, Spring 2011Reading theorists from Edward Said to Robert Bernasconi, we will examine the development of a particularly German style of Orientalism. Along the way we will consider the issues in using contemporary categories on historical texts. While Orientalism among German writers may be distinguished from French and English variations, the different languages all share the same texts as sources for their representations. We will consider the relationship between first hand travel accounts, first to each other, whereby each traveler writes in response to his predecessors, and then to domestic European syntheses of these travel narratives. Topics include: The intercultural conventions of hospitality concerning the treatment of strangers. The Balkans and the Black Sea as zones of confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Leibniz’s engagement with Chinese philosophy in the context of fashionable Chinoiserie and his disparagement of Ottoman Turks. The cultural negotiations implicit in Enlightenment depictions of religious tolerance. Is German Orientalism more concerned with Biblical exegesis than colonial power? The coalescence of Berlin’s museums in the nineteenth century as related to Prussian railroad building and archeology in the Ottoman Empire. Romantic fascination with religions on the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Novalis to Hermann Hesse. German hippies in India. Franz Kafka and other Habsburg writers’ ironic appropriation of China as a political foil. Anti-Semitism as Orientalism. The adequacy of world-systems theory as a means to describe the cultural negotiations inherent in Asian trading relations. Asia as depicted in Nazi ideology. The revitalization of Muslim stereotypes in immigration and assimilation debates across Europe. The self-conscious maneuvering around Orientalism in contemporary transnational writing in German. Readings and discussions will be in German and English. Student will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 20-page research paper.
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Cosmopolitanism and World Literature, Spring 2010This course will examine the history and interdependence of these two key critical terms. In addition to Goethe's founding remarks on Weltliteratur, we will read works by Immanuel Kant and host of contemporary theorists defining Cosmopolitanism in relation to the Enlightenment commitment to universal human rights, anti-colonialism, the autonomy of indigenous peoples and cultures. We will also examine how cosmopolitanism presumes 'nation' as a category in its definition of otherness, even as it seeks to suspend the strict boundaries between cultures. How was this dialectic between patriotism and cosmopolitanism negotiated in the eighteenth century and in current theory? We will consider nationalist denunciations of cosmopolitanism, in particular paranoia that equates Judaism with rootlessness. How are these anti-semitic arguments answered by cosmopolitans writing anything from Enlightenment drama to contemporary transnational fiction? Why is cosmopolitanism so often equated with secret societies?
The second half of the course will consider the contemporary iterations both in terms of political theory and transnational literature written in German. We will consider how these terms first reemerge within post-war German political debates about the Nazis and then how they find aesthetic forms in contemporary experimental literature written by Yoko Tawada, Jeannette Lander, Doron Rebinovici and Zafer Senocak. Political theory will include those by Jiirgen Habermas, Bruce Robbins, Kwame Appiah , Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Seyla Benhabib, Gayatri Spivak. |
Modern Fashion Theory and the Geography of Style, Fall 2009
This class will employ theories of spatial relations and distance to explore the emergence of modern consumer culture. Readings will cover the history of fashion and consumption from the eighteenth century to the present. We will explore the relationship between urban density and imperial expansion in the formation of modern consumption patterns. We will read historical theories on the emergence of global capitalism in order to consider Cosmopolitanism as a material culture with a sensual fascination for food and fetishes while still remembering the many ways in which Cosmopolitanism justifies Enlightenment universal rights. From the baroque trickle-down theory to High Modernism, our ear will be trained on the spatial metaphors that justify luxury consumption. Our readings of literary texts will show how intensely local domestic relations depend upon the emergence of large-scale global relations of exchange. They will be grounded in the history of media: the emergence of modern consumption unfolds in tandem with new technological means of representing goods and desires. The class will review the history of fashion in Europe and North America in relation to the development of global commodity exchange. |
