Aesthetics: Reception Theory, Audiences, and Literature as Media

This course is open to graduate students only: What do literary works and artworks do for readers? Do readers use them to excite, calm, stabilize, or change themselves? How do we consider literature and the arts, as forms, from the point of view of 'the audience?' What happens if we consider literature as 'media?' Taking stock of previous theories of reception, reader response, audience research, history of the book, and media new and old, how shall we think about literature within the 'system of the arts' in the digital age?