POLS 596 Aesthetics and Politics

A graduate seminar that treats aesthetics not as a side concern of art history but as a battleground where political ideologies, conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, fascism, have fought over what counts as reality, taste, and the political itself. You'll trace this from Burke's reaction to the French Revolution through Futurism, Nazi spectacle, and Surrealism into the digital age, working through two short essays and a take-home term paper that demand close reading and your own argument rather than topic summaries. It pairs well with political theory and cultural studies coursework, and matters because the questions it raises, who shapes perception, whose sensibility becomes "common sense", sit underneath most contemporary debates about media, populism, and power.