Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle

Contents
Gail Finney, University of California, Davis. "Introduction"
Part I. Questions of Methodology and Aesthetics
Ch. 1. Questions of Methodology in Visual Studies, Nora M. Alter
Ch. 2. The Interarts Experiment in Early German Film, Ingeborg Hoesterey
Ch. 3. From Dance to Film: The Cinematic Art of Leni Riefenstahl and Dorothy Arzner, Dagmar von Hoff
Ch. 4. The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Blake Stimson
Ch. 5. Ready, Set, Made! Joseph Beuys and the Critique of Silence, Jan Mieszkowski
Ch. 6. Las Vegas on the Spree: The Americanization of the New Berlin, Janet Ward

Gail Finney is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of California, Davis. Her publications include The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction; Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century; Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (ed.); and Christa Wolf.

This volume of essays by 17 scholars is the outgrowth of a session on German visual culture at the 2001 Modern Language Association convention and represents a desire by German studies scholars to enter into the recently expanding arena of cultural studies. The essays cover a huge range of visual culture in 20th-century Germany that includes early German and Nazi era cinema, recent East German cabaret stage design, television sitcoms, contemporary painting and performance art, and the architectural transformation of Berlin since 1990. The essays are grouped into three sections--methodology and aesthetics, gender and sexuality, and political dimensions--that can be read either thematically, synchronically (according to visual medium), or chronologically (within the three sections) as editor Finney states in her introduction. The quality of scholarly insight among the individual essays is uneven, although some of the essays on methodology and aesthetics are enlightening. Others are as valuable for their works-cited sections. Many of the essays remind one that the most cogent observations on German visual culture are still to be found in the writings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other early, 20th-century critics. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students; faculty.W. S./P>--W. S. Bradley, Mesa State College"Choice" (01/01/2007)