Vegso, Roland
M 1 :50 PM
Park Hall 0067
Modernism and Media Theory
The first half of the 20th century saw the rise of a number of new mass media technologies that came to dominate cultural and social life for the rest of the century. In this historical context, the cultural position of literature (as a media technology itself) was increasingly challenged by new technologies of mass communication. In this course, we will use Walter Benjamin’s writings on media technologies as a guide to our discussions of early 20th-century media technologies. We will start with an examination of the idea of “literature” as a technological medium and, then, work our way through Benjamin’s and other modernist authors’ encounters with photography, cinema, radio, and television. In addition to Benjamin’s writings, our readings will most likely include texts by Kafka, Baudelaire, Brecht, Beckett, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Marinetti. Furthermore, we will take a look at some of the writings of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Balázs, László Mohly-Nagy, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams.