Program Seminar, Doctoral Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities (with Brigid Doherty)

This seminar explores Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" as an experiment in and a critique of modernist cultural history. Through its exacerbation of the antinomies of analyzing cultural production in historical terms and its theorization of technological media in relation to the history of art, the artwork essay interrogates both the very possibility of writing cultural history and the conditions of its necessity as a form of knowledge. Seminar focuses on the artwork essay's refunctioning of sources and models in a wide variety of disciplines and discourses, as well as on a number of exemplary exercises in cultural history and media theory in its aftermath.