Robert Goldman
goldman@lclark.edu
Howard 371
503 768 7662
Office hours: MW  10:00-12:00;  Tu 2-5

Required Books:

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. NY: Penguin, 1982.  

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.  Cambridge: Polity Press. 2000.

Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis.  University of Minnesota Press.  1992. [on reserve]

Steven Best & Douglas Kellner.  Postmodern Theory.  Guilford, 1991.

Readings:

Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. NY: Penguin, 1982. 

Richard Sennett, “The new political economy and its culture,” The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2000, pp.55-71.

Anthony Giddens,  ”The Contours of High Modernity,” pp.14-34, Modernity & Self Identity.  Stanford University Press, 1991.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.  Cambridge: Polity Press. 2000.

Edward Soja.  "History: Geography: Modernity," pp.10-35 in Postmodern Geographies.  Verso, 1989.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” tr. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1. (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27.

Walter Benjamin.  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Pp.217-52 in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. 1969. NY: Schocken Books.

Steven Best & Douglas Kellner.  Postmodern Theory.  Guilford, 1991. Pp.1-33.

Best & Kellner, ”Michel Foucault and the Critique of Modernity,” pp.34-75.

Michel Foucault.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.  ”Panopticism, ”pp.195-227.  Vintage. 1977.

Best & Kellner, ”Deleuze & Guattari, Schizos, Nomads, Rhizomes,” pp.76109.

Best & Kellner, ”Baudrillard en route to Postmodernity,” pp.111-145.

Jean Baudrillard, ”The End of production, pp.6-49, in Symbolic Exchange & Death.  Tr. Iain Hamilton Grant.  Sage.  1993.

Mark Poster,” Consumption and Digital Commodities In The Everyday,” Cultural Studies Vol. 18, No. 2/3 March/May 2004, pp. 409–423

Susan Willis, "Unwrapping use-value," pp.1-22 in A Primer for Daily Life.  Routledge, 1991.

Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. 1977. Detroit: Black & Red Press.

Jean Baudrillard.  Simulacra & Simulation. Translated, Sheila Faria Glaser.  University of Michigan, 1994, pp.1-42.

Brian Massumi, “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze & Guattari,” Copyright. No.1, 1987, pp.90-97.

Jean Baudrillard, ”After the Orgy,”, pp.3-13, in The Transparency of Evil.  Tr. James Benedict. Verso.  1993.

Jean Baudrillard, ”The Destiny of Value,” pp.1-4, in Paroxysm.  Tr. Chris Turner.  Verso.  1998.

Jean Baudrillard. ”Impossible Exchange,” pp.3-25 in Impossible Exchange.  Tr. Chris Turner. Verso. 2001.

Best & Kellner, ”Lyotard and Postmodern Gaming,” pp.146-180.

Jean-Francois Lyotard.  The Postmodern Condition. 1979. Excerpted on Internet.

Jurgen Habermas.  "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article," pp.102-107, in Media & Cultural Studies - KeyWorks, ed., Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas Kellner.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Fredrick Jameson.  "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, vol 146 (July-August 1984), pp.53-92.

David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. 1989. 

                  "Postmodernism," pp.39-65.

"Time-Space Compression and the rise of modernism as a cultural force," pp.260-283.

"Time-space compression and the postmodern condition," pp.284-307.

Celeste Olalquiaga.  Megalopolis.  University of Minnesota Press.  1992.

Jean Baudrillard, ”The spirit of terrorism,”  Le Monde 2 November 2001.  T. Dr Rachel Bloul

Douglas Kellner, “Baudrillard, Globalization and Terrorism: Some Comments on Recent Adventures of the Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday.  2004.

Best & Kellner, ”Marxism, Feminism and Political Postmodernism, pp.181-214.

”Critical Theory and Postmodern Theory,” 215-255.

”Towards the Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory,” 256-304.

J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press. 2006 (1996).

_______________________

J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Post-Capitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press. 2006

Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno.  The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  1947. 

Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

Buck-Morss, Susan, "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe," October 73 (Summer 1995): 3-26.

Course Requirements

I'd like to organize this class as a seminar on most days.  Toward this end, I'll ask that you form smallish groups, and we will rotate groups, week by week, taking responsibility for raising questions and framing and facilitating discussions.  This does not mean, however, that I will be absent from these discussions. 

In this class, attendance, preparation and participation will count for sixty percent of the grade.  The other aspect of participation is being an active member of the group in an online written exploration of the materials we are studying.  If you have had Social Theory with me you know this part of the drill.  Since we are a smaller group, I expect that this will work well. Here we can raise questions, go off on riffs, or muse about connections between ideas and issues. When everyone contributes to this, it will also raise the level of our discourse in the classroom by allowing us to practice, rehearse and preview our intellectual struggles.   

I'd also like to ask the groups to take on an additional intellectual focus.  Every course has intellectual gaps.  I'd like to ask each group to fill some of those gaps.  Thus, one group might be asked to become knowledgeable about political economy in historical perspective.  This group will then be able to provide us with a political economic context for our discussions.  Another group might be responsible for filling in historical contexts.  A third group might be responsible for filling in the gaps with respect to intellectual history.  This might be very important, because in a class such as this we are forced to sample a small slice of the theoretical works that are relevant.  A fourth group might become expert on the impact of technologies (in particular information technologies and communication technologies) on the transitions from modernity to postmodernity.

I want to leave open discussion of the formal writing assignments for the course and let you all help shape them.