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Reading Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay

Instructor(s): William Mazzarella
Winter 2025

Seldom has a canonical essay been at once so widely and so carelessly read as Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.’ This seminar takes a deep dive into the text, reading it alongside writings by Benjamin’s contemporaries as well as more recent analyses. We will discuss themes including the technological transformation of the conditions of experience amid the rise of fascism, the significance of Benjamin’s highly complex conception of aura, the indexicality of the photographic image, the political potentialities of innervation, the psychoanalytic implications of the notion of the optical unconscious, the redemption of distraction and mimesis (including Benjamin’s mimetic theory of language), and Benjamin’s productively ambivalent relation to right-wing cultural theorists.

ANTH 50522 | CCCT 50522