The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)

Course Pages

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.

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.

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.

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.

Paintings II
-A very brief consideration of how artists are responding to the loss of foundations to produce work that redefines art.

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.

Late-term Review
-Review of all the thinkers we have studied in Parts I and II of the class, along with some complementary material.

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