Media determine our situation. This course explores their history. How have technologies such as photography, film, radio, and the computer altered the human senses, our relationship to space and time, to each other, to institutions and governments? In what ways do new technologies shape the questions we ask about the natural world and the answers we give? How have critical approaches for thinking about media evolved over the past two hundred years, and what contributions have German-speaking thinkers in particular made to media theory? Drawing on a wide range of materials including scholarly articles, primary documents, photographs, films, literary texts, and audio recordings, we will work to develop a critical vocabulary and historical framework for analyzing the varied and widely distributed effects of technological change on both patterns of thought and physical reality, the imagination and the body, social relations, and their material networks and infrastructures. Topics include the so-called ‘reading revolution’ in late eighteenth-century Europe, print culture and the Enlightenment, human mediumship, spiritualism, and the occult, technology, and science, sound recording and the voice, radio and the Third Reich, cyborgs, and the ‘post-human,’ automation and surveillance, democracy and digital activism.

Course Requirements:

Readings of 10-25 pages per session or equivalent amount of time spent watching film clips or listening to audio. There are 10 pop quizzes based on those readings over the course of the semester. In addition, students are asked to write one 3-4 page paper and one 5-6 page paper. The final grade is determined according to the following distribution: Attendance, preparation, participation 25%. Pop quizzes 25%. First paper 20%. Final paper 30%.

Intended Audience:

Undergraduate German majors, students enrolled in the Digital Studies minor, students in American Culture and Screen Arts and Cultures.

Class Format:

Class is taught in English.