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May 17, 2025
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Fall 2025 Graduate Catalog
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ARH 520 - Media Aesthetics
In this seminar we will focus on a comparative approach to theories of visual media aesthetics across photography, cinema, and new media, from the nineteenth century to the present, and across disciplinary methods of art history, film studies, philosophy/critical theory, and media theory. Mixing canons and objects will allow a cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies for analyzing visual culture, and it should be useful for students working in a number of fields. This course will not offer a comprehensive survey as much as a close analysis of a body of related texts, ideas, and visual works. Students from any disciplinary background are welcome, and may adapt the final assignment to advance individual research goals. The selection of readings and examples we discuss will be adapted as the course unfolds. But, it is shaped by an interest in how/what media aesthetics can do or mean through the production of specific temporal and spatial forms of experience. This question has conditioned disciplinary formations, shaping canonical ideas about media in modernity as well as current interpretations of digital media. But it remains urgent to re-ask: how do, and how could, aesthetics and technics correlate with actual embodied and sociopolitical realities? How do specific material formats, specific practices of perception, and specific historical and cultural contexts interweave with and impact more abstract ontological, phenomenological, epistemological, and ethical potentials?
3 credits
Grading Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
Repeatable May be repeated for credit.
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