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Modernity, Postmodernism and
Multiple Modernities
Winter Semester 2003
2
Credits
Prof
Sally Humphrey
Dr
Sophia Howlett
Intensive
Course from Monday, January 13th to Thursday, January 23rd
Brief Course Description
The course will examine the conflicts between the
unified/linear perspective of modernism, the multiple perspectives of
postmodernism and the discourse of multiple modernities. These conflicts will
be re-assessed and debated through a variety of significant themes or tropes that
characterise the modern period - rejection of the past, technological progress,
and universalistic political and social theories – and through the
contradictions, exclusions, blindnesses and resistances that modernity has
produced. Consequently, we will also examine more closely modernity and
postmodernity themselves: the epistemology of modernism, for instance, and
modernism’s effects on the imagination of both pasts and futures.
Assessment
·
Class Participation, plus acting as the opening discussant for one
session
·
Midcourse comment on readings of 2-3 pages, to be handed in after the
mid-course weekend (Monday morning, January 20th)
·
Project for a paper that would develop one of the course topics in more
depth. This project should outline the proposed topic and approach to that
topic (data, where necessary, theoretical framework, line of
argument/hypothesis et al), explain why the project is worthwhile and provide a
suggested bibliography
Lecture 1: Introduction
The
Problems of Definition: defining modernity (various periodisations and the
problem of periodisation, definition varying with the problematics, from the
Enlightenment to when? 1989?); defining postmodernity (in conjunction with
modernity, post- what? anticipations of postmodernism in the early 20th
century); multiple modernities (Frederic Jameson’s discussion as a site for
debate – Postmodernism is not new and multiple modernities are as apolitical as
multiculturalism; multiplicity of points of view central to both postmodernism
and multiple modernities). Subversion of the universalising perspective of
modernity
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