Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This paper examines the theoretical difficulties related to the study of Gretel Karplus Adorno, wife of Theodor Adorno. In 1937, Karplus turned away from a successful career as an independent businesswoman to become Adorno's wife, unofficial secretary, and life-long promoter. This decision challenges contemporary assumptions that women in Karplus' situation were either stifled during their lives or intentionally overlooked posthumously. In contrast, this paper analyzes Karplus's 1930-40 correspondence with Walter Benjamin to suggest that she saw her marriage and submission to her husband's ambition as an opportunity to achieve her own life goals, not an obstacle to those goals. Karplus found financial success and social disappointment in her Berlin career. She developed close relationships with Adorno and Benjamin out of a desire for their intellectual companionship. For this reason, she was eager to support their work, even at the cost of her manufacturing career. This paper concludes that a biography of Karplus must not only accept her decision to leave her career, despite its apparent complicity with a patriarchal bias towards men and husbands. Such a biography must also challenge ideas of success defined by the bourgeois notion of an individual genius who produces products (e.g. books) in isolation.

Committee: John Davidson (Committee Member); Paul Reitter (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Germanic Literature; History

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, English

The early years of the 1960's saw the simultaneous development of two significant strands of American political and pop cultural movement. The tensions of the preeminent Cold War were mounting to the dramatic and promisingly radioactive head of the Cuban Missile Crisis, manifesting in military-backed propaganda campaigns and bomb tests in the Southwest deserts and islands in the Pacific. And at the same time, with the publication of Rachel Carson's seminal Silent Spring, growing anxieties about human environmental alteration were beginning to crystallize into the modern environmental movement, which would result in the establishment of the EPA later in the decade. From these two interlinked strands emerged a profusion of science fiction imaginaries of the future. Taking the form of pulp fiction, comic books, and television serials, these speculative depictions of the future ranged from the dystopic to the fantastic, incorporating the historical situation in which their creators were embedded. Today, aware of the Anthropocene and entrenched in late capitalism, many have remarked on the inability of contemporary subjectivities to envision radical futures, instead regurgitating only the dead dreams of the past. To confront and confound these narrowed horizons, I suggest a reawakening of several science fiction imaginaries from the cluster of years centering around 1962. This study will take up the cultural ephemera of a turbulent decade, drawing on the cultural theory of the Frankfurt School, Amitav Ghosh, and Mark Fisher, to question the mechanisms that have constrained our sense of ‘reality,' to probe the limitations on the thinkable, and ultimately, to free the future.

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Advisor) Subjects: Ecology; Environmental Philosophy; Environmental Science; History; Literature; Political Science

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2023, Sociology (Arts and Sciences)

First available in the US in 2017, TikTok is a relatively new social media platform. This, however, has not prevented it from playing a massive role in people's socialization. Although some hail social media as the end of the culture industry's tyranny, the fundamental logic of capitalist ownership and production still guides TikTok, as evidenced by the prevalence of advertising, data collection, and censorship on the platform. In capitalist society, ubiquitous hints of emancipation that are often eclipsed by realities of alienation and manipulation lead people to crave something "real," or "authentic” – perhaps explaining the latter term's status as a buzzword in TikTok discourse. With authenticity being a socially constructed designation, I aim to discern the criteria people employ to determine (in)authenticity on TikTok. I ground my critique in the Frankfurt School to explore how determinations of authenticity reinforce or subvert capitalist reality. To gather data, I conducted a “scavenger hunt” study of 238 people in which they provided links to videos they deemed fake and authentic alongside justifications for why they thought a video was apt. After coding justifications with a Systematic Thematic Discovery approach, I found that most definitions of authenticity (relatability, vulnerability, good marketing…) reinforce the capitalist status quo; however, some – like the tendency to see profiteering as fake – suggest that “seeing through” is possible. This has notable implications for the creation of echo chambers, the formation of identity, and the definition of reality in capitalist society.

Committee: Thomas Vander Ven (Committee Chair); Howard Welser (Committee Member); Matthew Rosen (Committee Member); Cynthia Anderson (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Sociology

BA, Oberlin College, 2019, History

This thesis is an intellectual history of dialecticism and its use in the works of the Frankfurt School members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Famously, these two men had a ferocious and polemical debate in the pages of Dissent Magazine in 1955-56. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate has since become almost the sole lens in which the intellectual differences and similarities between these men are analyzed. Through a comparative and historical analysis of their individual work, largely removed from the Dissent Debate, I offer a new interpretation of their conflict, their personal relationship, and a new perspective on critical theory and its relationship to political action. I argue that Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse's intellectual ideas are better juxtaposed through their interpretation of dialectics, rather than psychoanalysis, and that through this, they present us with starkly different prescriptions for individual and collective political engagement. Thus, both Fromm and Marcuse are outliers within the field of critical theory, and certainly within the Frankfurt School, even as their ideas remain in firm conflict with one another.

Committee: Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor) Subjects: American History; American Studies; European History; History; Modern History; Philosophy; Political Science