ROMS 6350 - Images and History: Siegfried Kracauer

(crosslisted) GERST 6355

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with GERST 4355/JWST 4350/ROMS 4350

E. Traverso.

As an outstanding figure of critical theory in the twentieth century, Siegfried Kracauer left an astonishingly rich body of work spanning literature and the sociology of mass culture, film criticism and the philosophy of history. The common thread that runs through his prismatic works is the conception of image as a key for interpreting life, society and history. This seminar will reconstitute and analyze his intellectual trajectory from the Weimar Republic to his exile in New York, reading several fundamental texts, from his early essays on photography and dance to his more known theoretical works (From Caligari to Hitler, Theory of Film, and History: The Last Things Before the Last.) It also will inscribe Kracauer into a historical context and an intellectual constellation shaped by his correspondence and friendship with other illustrious Jewish-German exiles, from Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch to Erwin Panofsky.