"The Frankfurt School & the Politics of Visual Aesthetics”
Professor Daniel Purdy Fall 2021
[email protected]
Tuesdays & Thursdays
4:30-5:50
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, Herbert Marcuse, 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. Everyone will be asked to give one class presentation on a reading from the syllabus and to write a final 15-page research paper.
Class Schedule
Tuesday, August 24
Introduction
Thursday, August 26. Selections from The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker The Communist Manifesto, pp.473-500
Tuesday, August 31
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, pp.87-129.Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1: 302-329
Thursday, September 2
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish”
Tuesday, September 7
Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life” & Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto”
Thursday, September 9
Georg Lukacs, The Phenomenon of Reification, 83-110
Tuesday, September 14
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Siegfried Kracauer, From Calagari to Hitler 61-76
Anton Kaes, “The Cabinet of Caligari: Expressionism and Cinema;”
Tom Gunning, “ The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”
Thursday, September 16
From Expressionism to Dadaism, John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic, 25-33, 44-57
Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,”
Tuesday, September 21
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Thursday, September 23
Sergei Eisenstein, “Strike;” “The Montage of Film Attractions,” Guiliana Bruno, “Architecture and the Moving Image”
Tuesday, September 28
Siegfried Kracauer, “Ornament of the Masses,” “The Hotel Lobby,” “The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies”
Tuesday, October 5
Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl Please order this book now.
Optional Reading for later: Patrizia McBride, “Learning to See in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen;
Andreas Huyssen, “Double Exposure Berlin: Photomontage and Narrative in Höch and Keun,”
Thursday, October 7. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer (vol. 2.2), The Story-teller (vol. 3)
Tuesday, October 12
Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography” The Photography of Eugene Atget, Karl Blossfeldt & August Sander
Thursday, October 14
Walter Benjamin, “The Doctrine of Similarity”
Tuesday, October 19
Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire;” Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life
Thursday, October 21
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Konvoluts A, K, M, & N
Tuesday, October 26
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
Thursday, October 28
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,”
Tuesday, November 2
Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp.3-42;
Tuesday, November 9
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120-167
Thursday, November 11
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 1-38 & Conclusion
Tuesday, November 16
Adorno, “Culture and Administration”
Thursday, November 18
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory pp.1-20
Tuesday, November 30
Theodor Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
Thursday, December 2
Jürgen Habermas
The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere
Tuesday, December 7
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to Actually Existing Democracy”
Joan Landes, “The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration”
Thursday, December 9
Final Papers Summary
Spring 2020
Visual Culture Theory and History investigates accounts of the visual and visualization from Roman rhetoric of the memory arts to modernist forms of the book arts, graphic novels in particular, material culture (from popular consumer culture to high-design fashions and objects), architecture and urban spaces, film and television. Our overarching aim will be to understand the theoretical texts that define the field of Visual Studies. Our discussions will include the work of the Frankfurt School, French post-structuralism, feminist psychoanalytic film theory, and contemporary German media studies. The course will engage with avant-garde aesthetics as a mean of understanding the visual potentials provided by twentieth-century technologies. Students will be asked to present on one of the primary the reading assignments and write a 15-page final research paper.
Week 1 Proposing Visual Studies
Tuesday January 14
Introduction
Thursday January 16
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What is Visual Culture?” & “The Subject of Visual Culture” Visual Culture Reader, Chapter one
Norman Bryson, Preface
Week 2 Critique of Visual Studies
Tuesday January 21
October questionnaire
Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7.2 (2008): 131-146.
Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2.1 (2003):5-32.
Thursday January 23
W.J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Studies”
Week 3 Classical Images and Rhetoric
Tuesday January 28: Memory Arts and the Graphic Image
Quintilian, Institutio Oratorio
Rhetorica ad Herennium
The Legend of Simonides
Francis Yates, Chapter 1, The Art of Memory
Thursday January 30: Ekphrasis
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” Picture Theory, 151-81
Week 4 Semiotics
Tuesday February 4
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text: “The Photographic Message,” “The Rhetoric of the Image” Mythologies: “The World of Wrestling,” “Soap-Powders and Detergents,” “Wine and Milk,” “The New Citroën,” & “Myth Today”
Thursday February 6
Gillian Rose, “Semiology: Laying Bare the Prejudices Beneath the Smooth Surface of the Visible” in Visual Methodologies, 106-145
Week 5 Visuality and Spectacle
Tuesday February 11
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde,” & “Practices of display and the circulation of images”
Thursday February 13
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema—The Logistics of Perception
Rebecca Haddaway presentation
Week 6 Psychoanalysis: Sexual Desire and the Image
Tuesday February 18
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1973,
Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
Thursday February 20
Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality in the Field of Vision,”
Week 7 The Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin
Tuesday February 25
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)
“Doctrine of the Similar,” “The Mimetic Faculty” Selections from One-Way Street (Filling Station, Imperial Panorama, Attested Auditor of Books, Optician, Toys), “Surrealism”
Thursday February 27
Susan Sontag, “The Image-World” & “Fascinating Fascism” Joe Glinbizzi presntation
Week 8 Museums and Curating
Tuesday March 3
Susan Stewart, On Longing, 132-69
Virginia Woolf, “Solid Objects” (1919) Emma Rossby presentation
Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),”
Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999) 1-28
Thursday March 5
Donald Preziosi, “Epilogue: The Art of Art History” (1998) The Art of Art History, 2nd
ed. (2009), 488-503 A
Mieke Bal, “Guest Column: Exhibition Practices,” PMLA 125(1) January 2010, 9-23
Hannah Mantango presentation
March 9 to 15 SPRINGBREAK
Week 9 Optical Unconscious
Tuesday March 17
Jean-Paul Sartre, intro and part of ch. 1 of Psychology of Imagination: idea that the image is a consciousness
Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers” and “Little History of Photography”: idea of the optical unconscious in photography
Thursday March 19 Professor Nancy Locke visits
Kaja Silverman, intro and ch. 1 of The Miracle of Analogy: idea that the photograph is an analogy, not an imprint
Week 10 Media Theory and Vilém Flusser
Tuesday March 24
Selections from Vilém Flusser, Writings
Introduction
What is Communication?
On the Theory of Communication
Line and Surface
The Codified World
Thursday March 26
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography 41-82
Week 11 Graphic Novels
Tuesday March 31 Lynda Barry, Making Comics
Visit by Professor Susan Squier
Thursday, April 2
Graphic Medicine and Representations of the Virus
Week 12 Fashion and the Play of Surfaces
Tuesday April 7
Charles Baudelaire, “Beauty, Fashion, and Happiness,” “Modernity,” “The Dandy,” & “In Praise of Cosmetics”
Adolf Loos “Ornament and Crime,” “Men’s Fashion,” & “Men’s Hats,”
Georg Simmel, “Fashion” Maddy McClusky presentation
J.C. Flügel, “The Great Masculine Renunciation and its Causes,”
Thursday April 9
Simon de Beauvoir, “Social Life” from The Second Sex
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade”
Week 13 Empathy and Neuroaesthetics
Tuesday April 14 David Freedberg, The Power of Images,”Introduction” & pp1-33; “Empathy, Motion and Emotion”
presentation Dina Mahmoud
Thursday April 16 Prof. Cassie Mansfield
Neuroaesthetics, Matthew Rampley The Seductions of Darwin chapter 3
Week 14 Eluding Surveillance or Cooperating
Tuesday April 21
Graffiti, Caitlin Bruce, Painting Publics
Thursday April 23
Faciality, Jessica Helfland, Faces
Week 15 Television Studies
Tuesday April 28
David Thorburg, “TV in the Digital Age”
Milly Buonanno, “Seriality”
presentation by Robin Duffee
Amanda Lotz, “The Paradigmatic Evolution of U.S. Television and the Emergence of Internet-Distributed Television”
Graeme Turner, “Approaching the cultures of use: Netflix, disruption and the audience”
Thursday April 30
Conclusion
Fall 2019
Bauhaus 100
Bauhaus100 will examine the history and legacy of Modernism’s most important school of design, founded in 1919. We will review the aesthetic and political agendas within avant-garde Modernism generally by concentrating Bauhaus’s central teachings about the relationships between architecture and design, the body in its social environment, and the radical potential of new media in redefining experience. In addition to reviewing the architecture of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Hannes Meyer, we will devote our attention to Bauhaus innovations in photography, dance, theater, painting, fashion, and publicity. As we reconsider the established (masculine) dogma of High Modernism, we will turn attention to women’s innovations in Bauhaus design, particularly the metal-work and collages of Marianne Brandt, in order to formulate more complexly gendered critique of industrial design and media. We will also examine Bauhaus ideas as they circulated in the Americas in the second half of the century, in order to consider how the field of Visual Studies emerged during the Cold War through the reception of photography and theory generated by László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes. Finally, we will look to the 1960s design of Dieter Rams in order to reveal the links between Apple and Bauhaus. Taught in English and in conjunction with Bauhaus Transfers, an international symposium on September 19 - 21, 2019, sponsored by the Department of Architecture and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute at Penn State. Readings and discussions will be in a mix of German and English. Student will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 15-page research paper.
Tuesday, August 27 Introduction
Thursday, August 29 Walter Gropius, Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar April 1919 & Charles W. Haxthausen, “Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger, Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919,”64-67.
Tuesday September 3 Bauhaus from Expressionism to Corporate Capitalism
Karen Koehler, “The Bauhaus Manifesto Postwar to Postwar: From the Street to the Wall to the Radio to the Memoir,” Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed Jeffrey Saletnik & Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2009), 13-36.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1-3
Georg Heym poems
Lyonel Feininger paintings https://www.wikiart.org/en/lyonel-feininger/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry
Thursday, September 5 Metropolitan Coldness, New Objectivity,
Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life”
Tuesday, September 10 Big Picture Bauhaus
Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundamentals,” Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity, 1919-1933, ed. Barry Bergdoll & Leah Dickerman (New York: MOMA, 2009), 15-39.
Werner Durth & Paul Sigel, Baukultur: Spiegel gesellschaftlichen Wandels (Berlin: Jovis, 2009), 131-161.
Thursday, September 12 Marianne Brandt, Metal Work and Collage
Tuesday, September 17 Bauhaus Theater Oskar Schlemmer
Thursday, September 19 Bauhaus Theater Oskar Schlemmer
Tuesday, September 24 Women at Bauhaus
Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls”
Siegfried Kracuaer, Das Ornament der Masse
Susan Funkenstein, “Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus”
Kate Elswit, Watching Weimar Dance
Thursday, September 26: Students and Teachers
Elizabeth Otto & Patrick Rössler, Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School Introduction
Elizabeth Otto, “A ‘School of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt,”
Tuesday, October 1: Optical Media
László Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969).
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotographie Film, second edition (Munich: Albert Langen, 1927).
Thursday, October 3 GSA
Tuesday, October 8 Optical Media continued
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969).
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotographie Film, second edition (Munich: Albert Langen, 1927).
Thursday, October 10
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,”
Tuesday, October 15 Paul Scheerbart, The Gray Cloth A Novel on Glass Architecture & Walter
This book must be purchased
Thursday, October 17 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty”
Tuesday, October 22 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France and Space, Time and Architecture 477-517
Moholy-Nagy, Impressions of the old harbor in Marseilles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Sbywbl7Yo
Thursday, October 24 Walter Benjamin, A Little History of Photography Selected Writings, vol. 2.2: 507-530
“News about Flowers” Selected Writings vol. 2.1: 155-157
“Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” Gesammelte Schriften vol.2. 368-385
“Neues von Blumen” Gesammelte Schriften vol. 3: 151-153
Look at Canvas Folder with Atget photographs
See also, August Sanders Photographs https://www.tate.org.uk/search?aid=5319&type=artwork&page=4
Tuesday, October 29 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Konvolut A Arcades
Konvolut F Iron Construction
Konvolut N Theory of Knowledge
Thursday, October 31 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, continued
Tuesday, November 5 Move to Dessau
Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, & Ise Gropius,1919-Bauhaus-1928, MOMA catalogue 1938
Thursday, November 7 Dessau Bauhaus, Hans M. Wingler, Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 106-117, 398-467
Tuesday, November 12 László Moholy-Nagy,
The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist 1928
Thursday, November 14 Ocean Liners and Architecture
Le Corbusier, “Eyes Which Do Not See,” Towards a New Architecture
Tuesday, November 19 Advertising Posters
Kathleen G. Chapman, Expressionism and Poster Design in Germany, 1905-1922: Between Spirit and Commerce(Leiden: Brill, 2019), 101-136
Poster Auctions Catalogue November 8, 1998, 27
UFA Film Posters, 1918-1943, ed., Peter Mänz & Christian Maryska (Heidelberg: Umschau Braus, 1998)
Ludwig Hohlwein: Kunstgewerbe und Reklamekunst, ed Volker Duvigneau & Norbert Götz (Munich:Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1996)
Thursday, November 21 Bauhaus is not a Style
Frederic J. Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture,” Bauhaus Culture from Wimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115-138.
Robin Schuldenfrei, “The Irreproducibilty of the Bauhaus Object,” Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed., Jeffrey Saletnik & Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2009), 37-60.
Tuesday, December 3 Hannes Meyer Era
Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Cologne: Taschen, 2019)
Selections from Hans Wingler, 161-163, 486-497.
Thursday, December 5 Posthumanism
K. Michael Hays, “The Bauhaus and the Radicalization of Building,” 121-148
Critical Voices on the Left, Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Tuesday, December 10 Mies van der Rohe Era,
Selections from Hans Wingler, 532-555
Mies written statements
Selections from Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and manifestos of 20th-century architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971)
Working Theses 1923, p. 74
Industrialized Building, 1924, p. 81
On the Form in Architecture, 1927 p. 102
The New Era, 1930 p. 123
Thursday, December 12 Bauhaus and the Establishment of Modern Architecture,
Walter Gropius, the new architecture and the bauhaus
Professor Daniel Purdy Fall 2021
[email protected]
Tuesdays & Thursdays
4:30-5:50
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, Herbert Marcuse, 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. Everyone will be asked to give one class presentation on a reading from the syllabus and to write a final 15-page research paper.
Class Schedule
Tuesday, August 24
Introduction
Thursday, August 26. Selections from The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker The Communist Manifesto, pp.473-500
Tuesday, August 31
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, pp.87-129.Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1: 302-329
Thursday, September 2
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish”
Tuesday, September 7
Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life” & Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto”
Thursday, September 9
Georg Lukacs, The Phenomenon of Reification, 83-110
Tuesday, September 14
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Siegfried Kracauer, From Calagari to Hitler 61-76
Anton Kaes, “The Cabinet of Caligari: Expressionism and Cinema;”
Tom Gunning, “ The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”
Thursday, September 16
From Expressionism to Dadaism, John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic, 25-33, 44-57
Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,”
Tuesday, September 21
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Thursday, September 23
Sergei Eisenstein, “Strike;” “The Montage of Film Attractions,” Guiliana Bruno, “Architecture and the Moving Image”
Tuesday, September 28
Siegfried Kracauer, “Ornament of the Masses,” “The Hotel Lobby,” “The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies”
Tuesday, October 5
Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl Please order this book now.
Optional Reading for later: Patrizia McBride, “Learning to See in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen;
Andreas Huyssen, “Double Exposure Berlin: Photomontage and Narrative in Höch and Keun,”
Thursday, October 7. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer (vol. 2.2), The Story-teller (vol. 3)
Tuesday, October 12
Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography” The Photography of Eugene Atget, Karl Blossfeldt & August Sander
Thursday, October 14
Walter Benjamin, “The Doctrine of Similarity”
Tuesday, October 19
Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire;” Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life
Thursday, October 21
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Konvoluts A, K, M, & N
Tuesday, October 26
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
Thursday, October 28
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,”
Tuesday, November 2
Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp.3-42;
Tuesday, November 9
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120-167
Thursday, November 11
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 1-38 & Conclusion
Tuesday, November 16
Adorno, “Culture and Administration”
Thursday, November 18
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory pp.1-20
Tuesday, November 30
Theodor Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
Thursday, December 2
Jürgen Habermas
The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere
Tuesday, December 7
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to Actually Existing Democracy”
Joan Landes, “The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration”
Thursday, December 9
Final Papers Summary
Spring 2020
Visual Culture Theory and History investigates accounts of the visual and visualization from Roman rhetoric of the memory arts to modernist forms of the book arts, graphic novels in particular, material culture (from popular consumer culture to high-design fashions and objects), architecture and urban spaces, film and television. Our overarching aim will be to understand the theoretical texts that define the field of Visual Studies. Our discussions will include the work of the Frankfurt School, French post-structuralism, feminist psychoanalytic film theory, and contemporary German media studies. The course will engage with avant-garde aesthetics as a mean of understanding the visual potentials provided by twentieth-century technologies. Students will be asked to present on one of the primary the reading assignments and write a 15-page final research paper.
Week 1 Proposing Visual Studies
Tuesday January 14
Introduction
Thursday January 16
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What is Visual Culture?” & “The Subject of Visual Culture” Visual Culture Reader, Chapter one
Norman Bryson, Preface
Week 2 Critique of Visual Studies
Tuesday January 21
October questionnaire
Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7.2 (2008): 131-146.
Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2.1 (2003):5-32.
Thursday January 23
W.J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Studies”
Week 3 Classical Images and Rhetoric
Tuesday January 28: Memory Arts and the Graphic Image
Quintilian, Institutio Oratorio
Rhetorica ad Herennium
The Legend of Simonides
Francis Yates, Chapter 1, The Art of Memory
Thursday January 30: Ekphrasis
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” Picture Theory, 151-81
Week 4 Semiotics
Tuesday February 4
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text: “The Photographic Message,” “The Rhetoric of the Image” Mythologies: “The World of Wrestling,” “Soap-Powders and Detergents,” “Wine and Milk,” “The New Citroën,” & “Myth Today”
Thursday February 6
Gillian Rose, “Semiology: Laying Bare the Prejudices Beneath the Smooth Surface of the Visible” in Visual Methodologies, 106-145
Week 5 Visuality and Spectacle
Tuesday February 11
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde,” & “Practices of display and the circulation of images”
Thursday February 13
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema—The Logistics of Perception
Rebecca Haddaway presentation
Week 6 Psychoanalysis: Sexual Desire and the Image
Tuesday February 18
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1973,
Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
Thursday February 20
Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality in the Field of Vision,”
Week 7 The Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin
Tuesday February 25
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)
“Doctrine of the Similar,” “The Mimetic Faculty” Selections from One-Way Street (Filling Station, Imperial Panorama, Attested Auditor of Books, Optician, Toys), “Surrealism”
Thursday February 27
Susan Sontag, “The Image-World” & “Fascinating Fascism” Joe Glinbizzi presntation
Week 8 Museums and Curating
Tuesday March 3
Susan Stewart, On Longing, 132-69
Virginia Woolf, “Solid Objects” (1919) Emma Rossby presentation
Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),”
Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999) 1-28
Thursday March 5
Donald Preziosi, “Epilogue: The Art of Art History” (1998) The Art of Art History, 2nd
ed. (2009), 488-503 A
Mieke Bal, “Guest Column: Exhibition Practices,” PMLA 125(1) January 2010, 9-23
Hannah Mantango presentation
March 9 to 15 SPRINGBREAK
Week 9 Optical Unconscious
Tuesday March 17
Jean-Paul Sartre, intro and part of ch. 1 of Psychology of Imagination: idea that the image is a consciousness
Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers” and “Little History of Photography”: idea of the optical unconscious in photography
Thursday March 19 Professor Nancy Locke visits
Kaja Silverman, intro and ch. 1 of The Miracle of Analogy: idea that the photograph is an analogy, not an imprint
Week 10 Media Theory and Vilém Flusser
Tuesday March 24
Selections from Vilém Flusser, Writings
Introduction
What is Communication?
On the Theory of Communication
Line and Surface
The Codified World
Thursday March 26
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography 41-82
Week 11 Graphic Novels
Tuesday March 31 Lynda Barry, Making Comics
Visit by Professor Susan Squier
Thursday, April 2
Graphic Medicine and Representations of the Virus
Week 12 Fashion and the Play of Surfaces
Tuesday April 7
Charles Baudelaire, “Beauty, Fashion, and Happiness,” “Modernity,” “The Dandy,” & “In Praise of Cosmetics”
Adolf Loos “Ornament and Crime,” “Men’s Fashion,” & “Men’s Hats,”
Georg Simmel, “Fashion” Maddy McClusky presentation
J.C. Flügel, “The Great Masculine Renunciation and its Causes,”
Thursday April 9
Simon de Beauvoir, “Social Life” from The Second Sex
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade”
Week 13 Empathy and Neuroaesthetics
Tuesday April 14 David Freedberg, The Power of Images,”Introduction” & pp1-33; “Empathy, Motion and Emotion”
presentation Dina Mahmoud
Thursday April 16 Prof. Cassie Mansfield
Neuroaesthetics, Matthew Rampley The Seductions of Darwin chapter 3
Week 14 Eluding Surveillance or Cooperating
Tuesday April 21
Graffiti, Caitlin Bruce, Painting Publics
Thursday April 23
Faciality, Jessica Helfland, Faces
Week 15 Television Studies
Tuesday April 28
David Thorburg, “TV in the Digital Age”
Milly Buonanno, “Seriality”
presentation by Robin Duffee
Amanda Lotz, “The Paradigmatic Evolution of U.S. Television and the Emergence of Internet-Distributed Television”
Graeme Turner, “Approaching the cultures of use: Netflix, disruption and the audience”
Thursday April 30
Conclusion
Fall 2019
Bauhaus 100
Bauhaus100 will examine the history and legacy of Modernism’s most important school of design, founded in 1919. We will review the aesthetic and political agendas within avant-garde Modernism generally by concentrating Bauhaus’s central teachings about the relationships between architecture and design, the body in its social environment, and the radical potential of new media in redefining experience. In addition to reviewing the architecture of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Hannes Meyer, we will devote our attention to Bauhaus innovations in photography, dance, theater, painting, fashion, and publicity. As we reconsider the established (masculine) dogma of High Modernism, we will turn attention to women’s innovations in Bauhaus design, particularly the metal-work and collages of Marianne Brandt, in order to formulate more complexly gendered critique of industrial design and media. We will also examine Bauhaus ideas as they circulated in the Americas in the second half of the century, in order to consider how the field of Visual Studies emerged during the Cold War through the reception of photography and theory generated by László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes. Finally, we will look to the 1960s design of Dieter Rams in order to reveal the links between Apple and Bauhaus. Taught in English and in conjunction with Bauhaus Transfers, an international symposium on September 19 - 21, 2019, sponsored by the Department of Architecture and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute at Penn State. Readings and discussions will be in a mix of German and English. Student will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 15-page research paper.
Tuesday, August 27 Introduction
Thursday, August 29 Walter Gropius, Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar April 1919 & Charles W. Haxthausen, “Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger, Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919,”64-67.
Tuesday September 3 Bauhaus from Expressionism to Corporate Capitalism
Karen Koehler, “The Bauhaus Manifesto Postwar to Postwar: From the Street to the Wall to the Radio to the Memoir,” Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed Jeffrey Saletnik & Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2009), 13-36.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1-3
Georg Heym poems
Lyonel Feininger paintings https://www.wikiart.org/en/lyonel-feininger/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry
Thursday, September 5 Metropolitan Coldness, New Objectivity,
Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life”
Tuesday, September 10 Big Picture Bauhaus
Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundamentals,” Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity, 1919-1933, ed. Barry Bergdoll & Leah Dickerman (New York: MOMA, 2009), 15-39.
Werner Durth & Paul Sigel, Baukultur: Spiegel gesellschaftlichen Wandels (Berlin: Jovis, 2009), 131-161.
Thursday, September 12 Marianne Brandt, Metal Work and Collage
Tuesday, September 17 Bauhaus Theater Oskar Schlemmer
Thursday, September 19 Bauhaus Theater Oskar Schlemmer
Tuesday, September 24 Women at Bauhaus
Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls”
Siegfried Kracuaer, Das Ornament der Masse
Susan Funkenstein, “Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus”
Kate Elswit, Watching Weimar Dance
Thursday, September 26: Students and Teachers
Elizabeth Otto & Patrick Rössler, Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School Introduction
Elizabeth Otto, “A ‘School of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt,”
Tuesday, October 1: Optical Media
László Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969).
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotographie Film, second edition (Munich: Albert Langen, 1927).
Thursday, October 3 GSA
Tuesday, October 8 Optical Media continued
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969).
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotographie Film, second edition (Munich: Albert Langen, 1927).
Thursday, October 10
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,”
Tuesday, October 15 Paul Scheerbart, The Gray Cloth A Novel on Glass Architecture & Walter
This book must be purchased
Thursday, October 17 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty”
Tuesday, October 22 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France and Space, Time and Architecture 477-517
Moholy-Nagy, Impressions of the old harbor in Marseilles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Sbywbl7Yo
Thursday, October 24 Walter Benjamin, A Little History of Photography Selected Writings, vol. 2.2: 507-530
“News about Flowers” Selected Writings vol. 2.1: 155-157
“Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” Gesammelte Schriften vol.2. 368-385
“Neues von Blumen” Gesammelte Schriften vol. 3: 151-153
Look at Canvas Folder with Atget photographs
See also, August Sanders Photographs https://www.tate.org.uk/search?aid=5319&type=artwork&page=4
Tuesday, October 29 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Konvolut A Arcades
Konvolut F Iron Construction
Konvolut N Theory of Knowledge
Thursday, October 31 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, continued
Tuesday, November 5 Move to Dessau
Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, & Ise Gropius,1919-Bauhaus-1928, MOMA catalogue 1938
Thursday, November 7 Dessau Bauhaus, Hans M. Wingler, Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 106-117, 398-467
Tuesday, November 12 László Moholy-Nagy,
The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist 1928
Thursday, November 14 Ocean Liners and Architecture
Le Corbusier, “Eyes Which Do Not See,” Towards a New Architecture
Tuesday, November 19 Advertising Posters
Kathleen G. Chapman, Expressionism and Poster Design in Germany, 1905-1922: Between Spirit and Commerce(Leiden: Brill, 2019), 101-136
Poster Auctions Catalogue November 8, 1998, 27
UFA Film Posters, 1918-1943, ed., Peter Mänz & Christian Maryska (Heidelberg: Umschau Braus, 1998)
Ludwig Hohlwein: Kunstgewerbe und Reklamekunst, ed Volker Duvigneau & Norbert Götz (Munich:Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1996)
Thursday, November 21 Bauhaus is not a Style
Frederic J. Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture,” Bauhaus Culture from Wimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115-138.
Robin Schuldenfrei, “The Irreproducibilty of the Bauhaus Object,” Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed., Jeffrey Saletnik & Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge, 2009), 37-60.
Tuesday, December 3 Hannes Meyer Era
Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Cologne: Taschen, 2019)
Selections from Hans Wingler, 161-163, 486-497.
Thursday, December 5 Posthumanism
K. Michael Hays, “The Bauhaus and the Radicalization of Building,” 121-148
Critical Voices on the Left, Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Tuesday, December 10 Mies van der Rohe Era,
Selections from Hans Wingler, 532-555
Mies written statements
Selections from Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and manifestos of 20th-century architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971)
Working Theses 1923, p. 74
Industrialized Building, 1924, p. 81
On the Form in Architecture, 1927 p. 102
The New Era, 1930 p. 123
Thursday, December 12 Bauhaus and the Establishment of Modern Architecture,
Walter Gropius, the new architecture and the bauhaus
German Orientalism
Professor Daniel Purdy Spring 2019
Reading theorists from Edward Said to Robert Bernasconi, we will examine the development of particularly German styles of Orientalism. Along the way we will consider the issues in using contemporary categories on historical images and texts. While Orientalism among German writers may be distinguished from French and English variations, the different cultures all share the same images and 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? Topics include: Romantic fascination with religions on the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Novalis to Schopenhauer 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. The revitalization of Muslim stereotypes in immigration and assimilation debates across Europe. The self-conscious maneuvering around Orientalism in contemporary transnational writing in German. The persistence of Romantic images of India well into the twentieth century. Early German cinema and photography about China. Readings and discussions will be in a mix of German and English. Student will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 20-page research paper.
Tuesday, January 8. Introduction
Thursday, January 10 Edward Said Orientalism"Introduction;" Jürgen Osterhammel
Tuesday, January 15. Edward Said, Orientalism, 31-166; Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1-30
Thursday, January 17. Leibniz, Sina Novismima, David Mungello, The Great Encounter; Chinoiserie
Tuesday, January 22. Gotthold Lessing, Nathan der Weise
Thursday, January 24. Gotthold Lessing, Nathan der Weise
Tuesday, January 29 Walter Demel, “How the Chinese became yellow”
Thursday, January 31. Snow Day
Tuesday, February 5. Friedrich Schiller, Turandot
Thursday, February 7. Opera and the Orient, Puccini’s Turandot
Tuesday, February 12 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “West-östliche Divan”
Thursday, February 14. Goethe, Weltliteratur, David Damrosch, “Goethe coins a phrase”
Tuesday, February 19. Friedrich Schlegel, Die Weissheit der Inder (selections),
Thursday, February 21 Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire
Tuesday, February 26. The Figure of the Orientalist: ETA Hoffmann, "Der goldene Topf
Thursday, February 28 From Egypt to India? Novalis, "Die Lehrlinge zu Sais"
Tuesday, March 12 G.W.F. Hegel: China and India
Thursday, March 14. Romantic Orient, Schlegel “Idylle über den Müßiggang” August von Platen, Queer Orient,
Tuesday, March 19 Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, “Klänge aus dem Orient” & Thousand and One Nights
Thursday, March 21 Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Orientalische Briefeand the harem
Tuesday, March 26 Emil Franzos, Halb-Asien
Thursday, March 28 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen”
Tuesday, April 2 Franz Kafka, “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft” & Marco Polo
Thursday, April 4 Franz Kafka, “Beim Bau der chinsischen Mauer”
Tuesday, April 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Thursday, April 11 Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Das Märchen der 672te. Nacht
Tuesday, April 16 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Thursday, April 18 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tuesday, April 23 Walter Ruttmann, Melodie der Welt
Thursday, April 25 Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express
Professor Daniel Purdy Spring 2019
Reading theorists from Edward Said to Robert Bernasconi, we will examine the development of particularly German styles of Orientalism. Along the way we will consider the issues in using contemporary categories on historical images and texts. While Orientalism among German writers may be distinguished from French and English variations, the different cultures all share the same images and 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? Topics include: Romantic fascination with religions on the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Novalis to Schopenhauer 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. The revitalization of Muslim stereotypes in immigration and assimilation debates across Europe. The self-conscious maneuvering around Orientalism in contemporary transnational writing in German. The persistence of Romantic images of India well into the twentieth century. Early German cinema and photography about China. Readings and discussions will be in a mix of German and English. Student will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 20-page research paper.
Tuesday, January 8. Introduction
Thursday, January 10 Edward Said Orientalism"Introduction;" Jürgen Osterhammel
Tuesday, January 15. Edward Said, Orientalism, 31-166; Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 1-30
Thursday, January 17. Leibniz, Sina Novismima, David Mungello, The Great Encounter; Chinoiserie
Tuesday, January 22. Gotthold Lessing, Nathan der Weise
Thursday, January 24. Gotthold Lessing, Nathan der Weise
Tuesday, January 29 Walter Demel, “How the Chinese became yellow”
Thursday, January 31. Snow Day
Tuesday, February 5. Friedrich Schiller, Turandot
Thursday, February 7. Opera and the Orient, Puccini’s Turandot
Tuesday, February 12 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “West-östliche Divan”
Thursday, February 14. Goethe, Weltliteratur, David Damrosch, “Goethe coins a phrase”
Tuesday, February 19. Friedrich Schlegel, Die Weissheit der Inder (selections),
Thursday, February 21 Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire
Tuesday, February 26. The Figure of the Orientalist: ETA Hoffmann, "Der goldene Topf
Thursday, February 28 From Egypt to India? Novalis, "Die Lehrlinge zu Sais"
Tuesday, March 12 G.W.F. Hegel: China and India
Thursday, March 14. Romantic Orient, Schlegel “Idylle über den Müßiggang” August von Platen, Queer Orient,
Tuesday, March 19 Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, “Klänge aus dem Orient” & Thousand and One Nights
Thursday, March 21 Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Orientalische Briefeand the harem
Tuesday, March 26 Emil Franzos, Halb-Asien
Thursday, March 28 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen”
Tuesday, April 2 Franz Kafka, “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft” & Marco Polo
Thursday, April 4 Franz Kafka, “Beim Bau der chinsischen Mauer”
Tuesday, April 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Thursday, April 11 Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Das Märchen der 672te. Nacht
Tuesday, April 16 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Thursday, April 18 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Tuesday, April 23 Walter Ruttmann, Melodie der Welt
Thursday, April 25 Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express
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
[email protected]
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
[email protected]
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.
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.
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. |
