Elective

CLIT7013 Postmodernism

This course will explore a wide variety of phenomena characteristic of late 20th century culture. Notions such as fragmentation, irony, pastiche, playfulness, kitsch & camp, etc. will be examined. Making use of the city as guiding image, we will ask how postmodernism inflects questions of the stability of knowledge, the meaning of the subject, and the spectacle of the postmodern world. We will ask questions about the nature of global flow of goods, media, money, design, and concepts as they move between east, west, north, and south. Literature, film, theory, visual arts, architecture, music, TV shows and others will be discussed in the attempt of gaining a decently comprehensive understanding of what has been going on recently in world culture, and of how we are determined by these phenomena. The dynamics of a constantly reshaped connection between knowledge, sensation, language and the social contexts of the body will be closely examined.