Small Wonders: Media, Modernity, and the Moment: Experiments in Time

Photo of a sign that reads "All Art has been contemporary" over the Altes Museum in Berlin, Germany.

The Altes Museum (German for Old Museum), one of several internationally renowned museums on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany. The sign reads "All Art has been contemporary". (Photo courtesy of GALERIEopWEG on Flickr.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

21L.325

As Taught In

Fall 2010

Level

Undergraduate

Cite This Course

Course Description

Course Description

The "small wonders" to which our course will attend are moments of present time, depicted in the verbal and visual media of the modern age: newspapers, novels and stories, poems, photographs, films, etc. We will move between visual and verbal media across a considerable span of time, from eighteenth-century poetry and prose fiction to twenty-first century social networking and microblogging sites, and from sculpture to photography, film, and digital visual media. With help from philosophers, contemporary cultural historians, and others, we will begin to think about a media practice largely taken for granted in our own moment.

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Related Content

Noel Jackson. 21L.325 Small Wonders: Media, Modernity, and the Moment: Experiments in Time. Fall 2010. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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