The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)

• 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.
• Week 9 - Extra (Optional) Writing Assignment
   

Michael S. Roth