Professor Nicholas Rennie

This seminar focuses on a major interdisciplinary theoretical tradition in German writing, and its influence on selected thinkers of the last decades. Work of the Frankfurt School is among the most important 20th-century German-language contributions to such fields as sociology, political science, gender studies, film, cultural studies and comparative literature. We will read texts by such key figures of the Frankfurt School as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer for their relevance to a number of disciplines, but we will give particular consideration to literary and aesthetic questions. To this end, we will also read texts by select authors to whom these figures responded (e.g. Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Beckett). In the second half of the course we will trace the influence of the first generation of the Frankfurt School in the work of such theorists as Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Axel Honneth.
Mondays 4:30 - 7:10pm
Conference Room, 195 College Avenue (Comparative Literature)