58103 Ideas in History

Handbook description

This subject engages students in critical examination, discussion and reflection on some of the key ideas and intellectual movements in world history and how these inform current social, cultural, economic and political thought and practice. In particular, it explores how ideas and worldviews frame and influence communication socially, culturally and politically. Students explore non-Western as well as Western ideas and viewpoints and ways of understanding human history including those ideas and intellectual traditions attached to the categories of the 'modern' and modernity, the 'post-modern' and post-modernity and 'tradition' – culture, custom and community. These are examined through various themes from multiple cultural perspectives and activities which include those based in museums and other sites where ideas and their histories are represented.

Subject objectives/outcomes

At the completion of this subject, students are expected to be able to:

1. compare key ideas in social, political and economic movements to contemporary situations
2. understanding a piece of writing in relation to intellectual history to determine the context of an author's work
3. organise relationships between dominant and subordinate ideas into a coherent essay structure
4. judge the merits of written work based on specified criteria
5. produce a collection of essays at a publishable standard of scholarship

Contribution to graduate profile

This subject makes a major contribution to the students' capacity to think analytically, using key concepts in the social sciences and humanities, to evaluate their own work and manage projects. It also makes a contribution to their capacity to respect a plurality of perspectives.

Teaching and learning strategies

The overall outcome of this subject is to introduce students to ideas and how they have been constructed in history. It has a concurrent aim of developing students thinking and writing skills, particularly in persuading an audience to merit of the position being adopted.

This subject consists of a weekly lecture and tutorial.

Lectures introduce students to key concepts and their historical development while in tutorials students evaluate intellectual movements, their theoretical and empirical claims through activities designed to promote discussion and analysis.

Tutorials will also involve students in analysing texts, developing evaluation criteria and practicing turning cultural institutions and sites into epistemological and ontological problems.

Content

This subject organises a diverse range of ideas in world history under the now familiar rubrics within the social sciences and humanities – 'the modern and modernity'; 'the postmodern and postmodernity'; and the idea of 'tradition, culture, custom and community' – to simultaneously interrogate and problematise the multiple manifestations of those ideas. Key ideas and the practices and institutions associated with these will include: modernity and enlightenment (e.g., reason, progress, the self/individual, liberalism, feminism) modernity and decadence (e.g., Marxism, fascism, scientism and anti-science, Freud and Fanon); modernity and modernism (e.g.; the city/metropolis, the colony, radicalism and the avant-garde, conformism and utility); postmodernism and postmodernity (e.g., immanent critique, the meaning of 'post' , the postmodern subject – cyborgs, matrices and the non-human, postmodern politics, consumption, 'finite history' and history as narrative); the ideas of custom, tradition, culture and community (e.g., tradition and clan, family, tribe, nation, state and nationalism, memory and culture, religion and value).

Assessment

Assessment item 1: Peer Review of Journal Article Proposal

Assessment item 2: Journal Article

Assessment item 3: Publication Production

Minimum requirements

Students must present an expression of interest to publish a journal article by Week 3. In the expression of interest students will outline how they intend to research the idea, its history and current manifestation at the site, the argument they will be adopting, how the argument will structured and the evidence they will draw on to support their argument.

Students must submit a draft essay by week 7. Students who do not submit an EOI and draft essay to their tutors will be ineligible to have their assignments assessed.

Attendance is important in this subject because it is based on a collaborative approach which involves essential workshopping and interchange of ideas with other students and the tutor.

Students who fail to attend 85% of classes may be refused permission to have their final assessment item assessed (see Rule 3.8). An attendance roll will be taken at each class. Where possible, students should advise the tutor in a timely manner if they are unable to attend.

Indicative references

Asad, T. 2003, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.

Barnett, S.J. 2003, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Ben, M. 2003, Literature, Modernity and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Calinescu, M.1987, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press,Durham.

Chakrabarty, D. 2002, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.

Chakrabarty, D. 2000, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Eagleton, T. 1996, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell, Oxford.

Eisenstadt, S.N. 1973, Tradition, Change and Modernity, Wiley, New York.

Felski, R. 1995, The Gender of Modernity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Freud, S. 1964, Civilisation and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, eds James Strachey et ai., Vol. XXI, The Hogarth Press, London.

Frosh, S. 1991, Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self, Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Gallo, R. 2005, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-garde and the Technological Revolution, The MIT Press, Cambridge.

Gandelsonas, M. 2002, Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism and the Search for an Alternative Modernity, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Gentile, E. 2003, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, Fascism, CT: Praeger, Westport.

Giddens, A. 1990, The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Giddens, A. 1991, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Gilroy, P. 1993, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Verso, London.

Green, G. 2000, Theology, Hermeneutics and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Goody, J. 2004, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Hall, S. et al., 1995, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Haraway, D. 1991, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, (New York.

Hartt, J. N., Hart R. L. and Scharlemann, R. P. 1986, The Critique of Modernity: Theological Reflections on Contemporary Culture, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.

Ghosh, D. & Gillen, P. 2006, Colonialism and Modernity, UNSW Press, Kensington, NSW.

Heelas, P. 1998, Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Israel, J. 2001, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Jameson, F. 2002, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present , Verso, London.

Jameson, F.1991, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London.

Kellner, D. 1989, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Groenronberg, T. 1998, Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Kurasawa, F. 2004, The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-cultural Critique of Modernity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Laclau, E. 1988, 'Politics and the Limits of Modernity', in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Lash, S. & Friedman, J. (eds) 1992, Modernity and Identity, Blackwell, Oxford.

Lowy, M. & Sayre R. 2001, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter, Duke University Press, Durham.

Marinetti, F.T. 1991, 'The Founding and manifesto of futurism' in Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, Sun and Moon Classic, (Los Angelos.

Malik, I. 2004, Islam and Modernity, Pluto Press, London.

Owen, D. 1994, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, Routledge, London.

Marshall, B. 1994, Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Mellor, P. & Schilling, C. 1997, Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity, Sage Publications, London.

Osborne, P. 1995, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-garde, Verso, London.

Palmie, S. 2002, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition, Duke University Press, Durham.

Parsons, D. 2000, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, The City and Modernity, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Pile, S. 2005, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life, Sage, London.

Rosaldo, R., Canclini, N.G., Chiappari, C.L., Lopez, S.L. 1997, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Salvatore, A. 1997, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity, Ithaca, Reading.

Sangari, K. & Sudesh V. (eds) 1990, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Kali for Women, New Delhi.

Saunders, K. (eds) 2002, Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-Colonialism and Representation, Zed, London.

Scott, D. 2004, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Duke University Press, Durham.

Taxidou, O. 2004, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Terdiman, R. 1993, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Cornell University Press, New York.

Vattimo, G. 1998, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. trans. Snyder, J.R, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Venn, C. 2000, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity, SAGE Publications, London.

Weinstein, M. 1995, Culture/Flesh: Explorations of Post-Civilised Modernity, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

Wood, E. M. & Bellamy,J. (eds) 1997, In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, Monthly Review Press, New York.

Young, R. 2001, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford.

Yue Dong, M. & Goldstein, J.L. (eds) 2006, Everyday Modernity in China, University of Washington Press, Seattle.