Course Description

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MS 9325   Special Topic: Music, Media, Modernity

Course Description
This course explores the recent efflorescence of historical research on modernity. While we will focus on sound media, attention will also be paid to interactions with the visual dimensions of the modern. Topics will include minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, advertising, journalism and comics, the rise of sound recording, radio and cinema, and the new forms of intermediality that characterize the period between roughly 1850 and 1970. We will read writers such as Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Lisa Gitelman, Marshall Berman, Lawrence Levine, Arjun Appadurai, Robert C. Allen, Paul Gilroy, Stallybrass & White, Natalie Zemon Davis, E.P. Thompson, Eric Lott, Jonathan Sterne, Lewis Erenberg, Jackson Lears, Franco Moretti, Ann Douglas, Dale Cockrell, Anne Friedberg, and W.T. Lhamon, among others. So-called “digital humanities” approaches to historical research will be emphasized.

0.5 courseCross-listed with PMC 9733.



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