Browsing by Subject "Frankfurt School"
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Item Reproducibility in the age of mass feeling : toward a media history of the thirties(2019-09-24) Canfield, Kristin Louise; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Houser, Heather; Lewis, RandolphReproducibility in the Age of Mass Feeling plots a genealogy for media history that centers on the work of British and American writers in the 1930s. The project examines how these writers understood the newly reproducible character of media as essential to modern political belonging. Taking Walter Benjamin as a point of departure, this dissertation tracks how Richard Wright, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston incorporated emergent media in their own work. The project tracks competing theories of reproduction, elaborating how these writers related to the rapidly changing media environments in which they wrote and lived. Even as these writers critiqued the ways in which then-new media participated in and perpetuated a state built on racial exclusion, they were also excited about the possibility of harnessing the power of media to reform the state. As these writers incorporated elements of new media into their own works—for instance, by reproducing newspaper articles and photographs within them—they challenged narrow conceptions of authorial agency and demonstrated how one can be implicated in a system that one claims to oppose. Elevating the work of these writers to a place in media theory alongside Walter Benjamin, the project traces a literary context for connections between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. Staging the historiographical problem of how fascism and Jim Crow relate to one another in terms of theories of reproduction, the project excavates formal resonances between Benjamin’s critique of the Nazi state and Wright and Hurston’s writings on Jim Crow. A chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), an anti-fascist essay in which Woolf connects fascism abroad to British cultural politics, bridges the chapters on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston by demonstrating how Woolf understood media to be complicit in producing fascist subjects, while extending the dissertation’s media history of the 1930s to anglophone Europe.