Poslední úprava: Mgr. Karolína Šedivcová (09.11.2016)
Throughout a close reading of some texts of Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the course
aims to understand the contemporary use of mass media as the result of an historical process of evolution in our
approaches to creativity and communication. Constantly reshaped by the forms of our social living and influenced
by different kinds of power and authority, the idea of technique is understood through this course in its relation to
knowledge, art, freedom and power. Students will be guided through an understandong of how technology
influences our representation of the world, the ways in which we perceive our own experience, and the set of forms
and signs we use to communicate.
Témata jednotlivých seminářů:
1. W. Benjamin, introduction to his life and work.
2. The essay on work of art, historical situation and theoretical novelty.
3. The concept of aura and its decay.
4. New forms of art, cinema as the non-auratic mode of art.
5. Adorno and Horkeimer: historical introduction to the Frankfurt School.
6. History, dialectics, culture.
7. Dialectic of enlightenment: the concept of enightenment.
8. Enilightenment and technique.
9. Myth versus science: roots of our aim to domination.
10. From dictatorships to mass persuasion.
11. The cultural industry as our reflection.
12. Strategies of persuasion in cultural industry.
