Cultural Industry and the Aesthetics of the Spectacle

This course explores mass culture and distraction as conceptualized by the Frankfurt School. Readings and discussions will engage with the emergence of distraction as a specific category of experience; the function of entertainment in the culture industries of Nazi Germany; the critique of mass culture in post war Germany, and the reformulation of spectacle and distraction in Culture Studies and postmodern discourse. Readings: Schiller, Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, Debord, Baudrillard, Postman, Virilio, Norbert Bolz. In German.