开始时间: 04/22/2022 持续时间: Unknown
所在平台: CourseraArchive 课程类别: 人文 大学或机构: Wesleyan University(卫斯理大学) 授课老师: Michael S. Roth |
课程主页: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpostmodern
课程评论:没有评论
In this course we shall examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last two hundred years. We shall be concerned with the relations between culture and historical change, and our materials shall be drawn from a variety of areas: philosophy, the novel, and critical theory. Finally, we shall try to determine what it means to be modern today, and whether it makes sense to go beyond the modern to the postmodern.
The Modern and the Postmodern traces the intertwining of the idea of modernity with the idea of art or culture from the late 18th century until the present. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Western cultures have invested heavily in the notion that the world can be made more of a home for human beings through the development of culture (and technology). Throughout this period there has also developed a strong, sophisticated counter-movement that sees the Enlightenment effort as a disaster – destructive of both art and of the world.
The Western idea of modernity is linked to but not the same as the idea of modernism. We will examine both in this class and then consider postmodernism in relation both to the philosophical idea of modernity and to the aesthetic considerations of modernism.
This course covers a lot of ground, historically, conceptually and aesthetically. There is much to read, and very different kinds of reading: from philosophy to novels, from theory to poetry. Not all students will like all the reading, but if you digest it all, you should have a clearer sense of the cultural history of our present.Week I:Why is philosophy relevant to modernity? What are cultural
and intellectual history and how are they related to philosophy?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences"
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
Week II: — What is Enlightenment?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality"
Week III: — From
Enlightenment to Revolution
Karl
Marx, “Estranged Labor” from 1844 Manuscripts
Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, The Communist
Manifesto
Begin
reading Madame Bovary
Week IV: — Modernism and
Art for Art’s Sake
Gustave
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Week V: — Re-Imagining
the World
Charles
Darwin, “Struggle for Existence,” “Natural Selection” and “Sexual
Selection”
from The
Origin of Species (6th edition)
Darwin,
“Conclusion” from The Descent of Man
Week VI: — From Struggle
to Intensity
Charles
Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
Friedrich
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, essay
2
Week VII: — Review
Week VIII: — Intensity
and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt
Sigmund
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Week IX: — Intensity and the
Ordinary: Art, Loss, Forgiveness
Virginia
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Week X: — The Postmodern Everyday
Emerson,
“Experience” or “Self-Reliance”
Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Selections from Philosophical
Investigations
Week XI: — From Critical Theory to
Postmodernism
Horkheimer
and Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment”
Michel
Foucault, selections from Madness and
Civilization
“What is
Enlightenment?,” Foucault Reader
Week XII: — Review
Review
and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Alison
Bechdel, Fun Home
Jennifer
Egan “Ask Me if I Care,” The New Yorker (March
8, 2010): http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/03/08/100308fi_fiction_egan
Jennifer
Egan, “Out of Body” from A Visit from the
Goon Squad
_____,
“Black Box,” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/jennifer-egan-black-box.html
Week XIII: — Postmodern
Identities
Judith
Butler, "Introduction" from Undoing
Gender (2004)
Slavoj
Žižek, “You May!” London Review of Books,
vol. 21 (March 1999)
Week XIV: — Postmodern Pragmatisms
Rorty,
“Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism” and Cornel West, “Prophetic
Pragmatism” from Pragmatism:
A Reader.
Anthony
Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Contamination” from Cosmopolitanism:
Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), 101-113.
Bruno
Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of
Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern,” Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 2004), pp. 225-248.
This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last two hundred years. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
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