Kurt Andrew Beals

This dissertation examines the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-language poets have engaged with advertising and commercial media. Along with Dada and Concrete Poetry, it addresses recent developments in Digital Poetry that integrate commercial and technological innovations into poetic production. Drawing on the aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt School as well as recent work in media theory, it considers these movements in relation to the media environments in which they emerged, from the print media of the Weimar Era to the interactive media of the digital age, arguing that these literary movements are best understood not in opposition to, but in the mainstream of the media history of the past century.