| Prefigured by the Romantics and first realized in theory and practice by Richard Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk has exerted tremendous influence on Western culture in the twentieth century. It has inspired a wide range of theatre artists (E. Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, Vsevolod Meyerhold, to name but three), diverse spectacles (Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will , for instance, but also Eisenstein's October), and political movements (Nazism is inseparable from it, but so are elements of certain socialist aesthetics). Moreover, it is the aesthetic form that best explains much of contemporary digital culture, especially virtual reality and multimedia performance. The Gesamtkunstwerk, I argue, is an artistic tradition whose Romantic roots have found fertile soil in the technological transformations of modernity.; My dissertation begins with a discussion of the “aesthetic state” in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Chapter One), proceeds to a discussion of Bayreuth and Disneyland (Chapter Two), continues with a discussion of the Bauhaus Totaltheater and Andy Warhol's Factory (Chapter Three), then analyzes the relationship between Brecht, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and mass culture (Chapter Four), and ends with a reading of virtual reality in the light of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Chapter Five). Overall, the dissertation has the following objectives: to discuss the philosophical origins of the relationship among the Gesamtkunstwerk, technology, and mass culture; to introduce a critical vocabulary for discussing that relationship; and to present close comparative readings of a number of different works that exemplify that relationship. I argue that the Gesamtkunstwerk requires elaborate systems of mechanical reproduction in order to manifest itself as natural, and demands rigorous separation of labor and art in order to manifest itself as whole. Though I pay special attention to German and American sources, my sources traverse European and American performance practices between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. |
