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Weimar Visual Culture and Media Theory

The fields of "visual culture" and "media studies" have emerged over the last decades to embrace a wide-range of interdisciplinary approaches to studying the cultural significance of media and the ways in which technologies of seeing are imbricated by various social and political concerns. On the one hand, visual culture is a new -- and still hotly contested -- discipline, traversing art history, film, photography, popular culture, literary theory, cultural anthropology, among other fields. On the other hand, many of the theoretical and historical roots of visual culture and media studies can be traced back to the first third of the twentieth-century, arguably reaching a high-point during the 1920s in Weimar Germany. It is here that many of the most significant and far-reaching elaborations of the impact of new media on mass culture -- ranging from film, radio, photography, the photomontage, and the gramophone to advertising, theater, and cabaret -- were first articulated by the likes of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Jünger, and others. The purpose of this graduate seminar is to explore the origins of media theory by looking at and analyzing the visual culture of Weimar. We will start by attempting to understand the history of the concept "media theory" by reading selections from contemporary critics (such as Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Jonathan Crary) as well as several important precursors (ranging from Leon Battista Alberti and Rene Descartes to Sigmund Freud and Robert Musil). From there, we will turn to the visual culture of Weimar, focusing on a number of cultural developments and theoretical paradigms in media theory.

The study of Weimar visual culture and media theory is, by definition, interdisciplinary in nature, and I hope the course attracts participants from disciplines as diverse as literature, art history, musicology, film, architecture, and history. I intend the course to be a "research seminar" -- that is to say, participants will be responsible for presenting both the work assigned as well as their own, original work-in-progress. All participants will be asked to give two presentations throughout the quarter: One presentation will be on the material of the week (this can be done individually or in small groups) lasting about 20-25 minutes; the second presentation (20 minutes) will be on your work-in-progress and should correspond to your final project for the class. It will be delivered in week nine in the form of a conference paper.

There are also two written requirements: The first is a sample syllabus of a course that you would like to teach (at either the graduate level or the advanced undergraduate level) on some aspect of visual culture/media studies, ideally relating to, or at least including, the Weimar period. Having thought about and actually designed such a course will be especially important for you when you get ready to go on the job market. The second written requirement is a 20-page (expanded) version of your conference presentation. This will be due at the end of the quarter.

The 20-25 minute presentation on the week's assignment should introduce the material under discussion in a succinct format (about 5-10 minutes) and highlight what you consider to be several important ideas/themes/issues/questions that you would like to see discussed by the seminar participants. Where possible, the presentations should be illustrated with appropriate media (slides, film clips, etc). Please produce a handout for the class (xerox enough copies ahead of time), which outlines the main points of your presentation and includes a relevant bibliography. The presentation should not be written-out in advance but rather spoken from notes.

The second presentations will all take place on the same day (week nine) in the format of a conference. These papers will be organized into one-hour panels by topic and presenters will have 20 minutes to read the papers out loud. After each panel, participants and invited guests will have the opportunity to pose questions and critiques. The class for this day will run longer than three hours, but include dinner and drinks for everyone!

Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament
Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Schriften zu Ästhetik (parts of this are available in English translation in the course-reader)

Course-reader: includes essays by Alberti, Descartes, Musil, Freud, McLuhan, Gumbrecht, Crary, Benjamin, Döblin, Hausmann, Jünger, Levin, Petro, Huyssen, Hake, and Kaes.

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period

· Mediation and Re-mediation, or the Persistence of the "window paradigm"
· Short text by Alberti, "On Painting"
· Paintings by Raphael, Dürer, Velázquez, Matisse; photomontages by Heartfield
· In-class screening of short segment from Walter Ruttmann's film, Berlin: Symphony of the City
· Short passage from Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

· Primary text: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
· Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message" (course-reader)
· Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, excerpts from In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time (course-reader)
· Rene Descartes, "Ninth Discourse: The Description of Telescopes" from Optics (1637)
· Sigmund Freud, selection from The Interpretation of Dreams (course-reader)
· Jonathan Crary, excerpts from Techniques of the Observer (course-reader)

· Primary text: Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (introduction and chapter three)
· Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," from: The Mass Ornament
· Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography" (course-reader)
· Chronophotographs of Muybridge and Marey
· Mary Ann Doane, "Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema," from: The Emergence of Cinematic Time (course-reader)

· Primary texts: The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, "New Mass Media: Radio and Gramophone" (pp. 594-615), "Visual Culture: Illustrated Press and Photography" (pp. 641-654), "Visions of Plenty: Mass Consumption, Fashion, and Advertising" (pp. 655-672)
· Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament" and "Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces" (in The Mass Ornament)
· Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (chapters two and four)
· Watch Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)
· Andreas Huyssen, "The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang's Metropolis" (course-reader)

Week 5: Theory of the Montage: A Crisis of Narrativity?
April 30

· Primary text: Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
· Walter Benjamin, "The Crisis the Novel" (course-reader)
· Georg Lukács, chapters 4 and 5 of The Theory of the Novel (course-reader)

· Works of art by Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield (selection of documents and works of art in course-reader)
· The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, "From Dada to the New Objectivity: Art and Politics" (pp. 474-506)
· Alfred Döblin, selections from Schriften zu Ästhetik (English translations of several essays are available in the course-reader)
· Walter Benjamin, "Convolute N" from the Arcades Project (course-reader)
· Maud Lavin, "Androgyny and Spectatorship," from: Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (course-reader)

· The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, "Cinema from Expressionism to Social Realism" (pp. 617-640)
· Selections from Anton Kaes, Die Kino-Debatte (course-reader)
· Watch Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930)
· Selections in course-reader from Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Cinema (1947)
· Ernst Jünger, "Über den Schmerz" (abridged translation, "On Pain," in course-reader)
· Additional essays by Patrice Petro and Sabine Hake (course-reader)

· The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, "Theatre, Politics, and the Public Sphere" (pp. 530-550), "The Roaring Twenties: Cabaret and Urban Entertainment" (pp. 551-567)
· Primary documents from Mary Wigman, Josephine Baker, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator (course-reader)
· Film: Wege zur Kraft und Schönheit (1924)
· Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (chapters six and seven in course-reader)

All participants present papers (20 minutes in length) at a class conference on "Weimar Visual Culture and Media Theory." Exact schedule TBA.