Aesthetics Under Siege: Frankfurt School

This lecture course works with an expanded notion of the Frankfurt School. The Central figures treated are Siegfried Kracauer, Waler Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, but readings also include György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and some others. It focuses on aesthetic and political issues in high and mass culture debates in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. then and today. All readings will be contextualized in relationship to modernization, Marxism, and National Socialism in the first half of the past century. Metropolitan modernism, realism, the historical avant-garde, and mass media culture will be recurring themes throughout the semester which ends with a coda on the culture of the Cold War.