The Modern and Post Modern

60hrs

4credits

Marks-80

The Modern and Post modern (England, America and France) 

After being introduced to literary texts and contexts of the reformation, restoration and the renaissance, students are in this part of the course introduced to writings (Britain, America and France) and the history of these writings. Beginning with the Enlightenment, discussing the idea through Emmanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” the course will focus on the ideological moorings of “modern”, “modernism” and “modernity” in Literature, Art and Cinema through essays of  Karl Marx, Raymond Williams and Habermas.

Module –I                                                                                12 hours

Order-Chaos

1. From Enlightenment to Revolution

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (excerpts)

1. Modern & Modernism

When was modernism-Raymond Williams (excerpts)

1. Modernity

The Philosophical discourse of Modernity (excerpts) –Habermas

Module 11                                                                                12 hours

Writings and Art traditions

1. Howl-Allen Ginsberg
2. Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí.
3. Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon)
4. Edward Munch-Scream
5. John Cage-4’33
6. Visual poetry-Square poem
7. To the light house- Virginia Woolf
8. Murder in the Cathedral- T.S Elliot
9. James Joyce- Araby

References

• Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment? 1784

Was ist Äufklarung?

• Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Chapter 1 From Stanford University Press:http://www.sup.org/html/book_pages/0804736324/Chapter%201.pdf
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization chapter on the Great Confinement. Full text at:http://archive.org/details/MichelFoucaultMadnessAndCivilization
• Michel Foucault,"What is Enlightenment?," Foucault Readerhttp://foucault.info/documents/whatIsEnlightenment/foucault.whatIsEnlightenment.en.html

Postmodernism

Rather than trying to explain ‘postmodern’ in terms of a fixed philosophical position or as a kind of knowledge, we shall instead through this module present a ‘postmodern vocabulary’ in order to suggest its mobile, fragmented and paradoxical nature. This understanding will further be augmented through art traditions and cinema.

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