2008 Handbooks

The course focuses on clarifying the historical phenomenon of postmodernity, and how we might distinguish postmodernity from modernity. Historians and social scientists such as Stephen Toulmin, Zygmunt Bauman and Beverely Southgate have drawn attention to the need to recognise the historical nature of postmodernity, and the opportunity this recognition provides to reshape our responses to the world, acknowledging contingency, and respect for alternative points of view and alternative cultures. The course will reflect on why postmodernist ideas emerged in the 1960s, and their development across the economic, political and ethical dislocations of the 1970s and 1980s, and the implications of these ideas and ethics in a post Cold War world preoccupied with threats of global terrorism and climate change. The course will consider a range of postmodernist historical texts which express its therapeutic ambitions, and texts which challenge these interpretations.