This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
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Syllabus
WEEK 1
Course Pages
WEEK 2
Intensity and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt
With a focus on Civilization and its Discontents, we examine how Freud’s theories tried to expose profound instincts as they appeared in daily life.
WEEK 3
Intensity and the Ordinary: Art, Loss, Forgiveness
A reading of Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel To the Lighthouse shows how giving up the search for the “really real” can liberate one to attend to the everyday.
WEEK 4
The Postmodern Everyday
We go back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and forward to Ludwig Wittgenstein to consider how forms of life and language games need to foundation to be compelling.
WEEK 5
From Critical Theory to Postmodernism
Through a consideration of Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno along with Michel Foucault, we confront the philosophical effort to escape from totality in order to understand the politics of control.
WEEK 6
Paintings II
A very brief consideration of how artists are responding to the loss of foundations to produce work that redefines art.
WEEK 7
Postmodern Identities
We examine short pieces by Judith Butler and Slavjo Zizek to understand how identities get formed (and performed) in a world without foundations.
WEEK 8
Late-term Review
Review of all the thinkers we have studied in Parts I and II of the class, along with some complementary material.
WEEK 9
Postmodern Pragmatisms
After postmodern playfulness, or alongside it, we see the resurgence of the pragmatic impulse to return philosophy to real human problems.
Extra (Optional) Writing Assignment
