An examination of ideas about ‘kitsch’: mechanical ersatz culture in industrial societies.

Drawing on figures from Clement Greenberg to Theodor W. Adorno, Hermann Broch to Vladimir Nabokov, and Milan Kundera to Umberto Eco, the course asks what it means to make critical judgments when faced with simulation, cliché, sentimentality, and administered aesthetic experiences. Themes include industrialisation, consumer culture, immigrant assimilation, globalisation, and the shifting meanings of related terms like ‘camp’, poshlost, schmaltz, cursi, and ‘naff’.