GERM 353 - Framing Art, Framing Power

FC ARHU CD WADV

4 credits
Frames are everywhere in our daily lives. From the framed art on our walls to the glasses we wear to the framed videos we watch on framed screens, frames direct our attention and condition our perception. In this course, we will draw on the rich resources of the German intellectual tradition to study framing devices in literature, art, opera, film, and theater, with an eye to specifying how different framing techniques challenge or uphold power and hierarchy. How, for example, did the theater of the fourth wall inculcate bourgeois values? How did Wagner adopt or modify framing techniques from this tradition in conceptualizing the Gesamtkunstwerk? How did Brecht’s destabilization of the fourth wall mobilize a proletariat audience? We will trace out the media-historical, political, and ethical questions surrounding framing techniques in the 19th and 20th centuries and contemplate their continued relevance today. We will examine frame narratives in novella collections, operatic uses of the proscenium, the status of the fourth wall in theater, cinematic framing techniques, and the framing in and of visual art, which will be accompanied by object study at the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Readings and discussions in German.

Prerequisites: GERM 204.

Undergraduate Research Intensive