The Frankfurt School on Film and Mass Culture

Harvard FAS

This seminar considers the Frankfurt School's deliberations on film, radio, television, and mass culture. We will devote the majority of the course to three seminal figures: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and T. W. Adorno. More generally, we will focus on the debates catalyzed by the emergence of modern mass media and an industrialized visual culture; we will also reflect on the pertinence of these debates for our own contemporary culture of media convergence.