Aesthetic Theory/Cultural Studies

Catalog description

Aesthetic thought has a long and varied history, but aesthetic categories have recently become a central concern of cultural studies. This course combines readings in the history of aesthetics; twentieth-century work on aesthetics from various philosophical and disciplinary perspectives (from the "anti-aesthetic" to "a return to aesthetics"); and recent scholarship addressing (while not necessarily celebrating) the reemergence of aesthetic questions in cultural and media studies and the evolving relationship of the aesthetic to categories such as ideology, form, and virtuality. Readings from Schiller and Kant to Adorno, Berube, Foster, Ranciere, and Spivak.