HIST2312 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Moral Relativism
Week 12 HIST Lecture – Postmodernism, the challenge to modernity
Themes:
• ’s ad ’s – eerge i the ’s
• Tend to have the lifetime of a human generation – become the status quo and are then
challenged
• Strong influence over all the disciplines in the humanities
• Rest on a body of theory – made contributions useful for all historians
• Shifted from object of inquiry to the tool of language to enlighten about the past
• ’s a liguisti tur – the role of literary theory
• Decline and end of the Cold War, and fading influence of Marxism in scholarly critique
• The French Connection: poststructuralist theorists – broader approach
• Postmodernist scholars and historians
Postmodernism:
• Movement in humanities not the social sciences
• ’s ad ’s – height i the ’s ad ’s – past its peak but still using ideas
• Out of criticism and goes on to affect many forms of history
• An attack on the autonomy of history as a discipline
• Reaction against modernism – no longer in a modern age, gone beyond all the thing
associated with the modern age
• Starts off as a movement in the arts
• Strong belief in human progress and technology
• Implies rejection of tradition – hangover from a backward past
• Believed in the grand narrative (human progress to bigger and better things) – human liberty
• Rejection of the assumptions of modernity – radical critic of the status quo
• Related to the politial ad soial radialis of the ’s – Marxist critique starts to fade
• Rejection of the functionalism of buildings – more subjective and expressive, self-conscious
as a building – the architectural metaphor
The French Connection:
• Influence of French intellectual trends – after the 1968 student uprisings
• Influence on American academics in the 1970s – influences the academic world
• English becomes the global language of inquiry – hegemonic status
• Always lose something through the translation
Poststructuralism:
• After the age of structure – came up with theory of language being a system of signs
• Ferdinand de Saussure – a system of structure
• Relationship between different signs in the structure
• Challenge to empiricism
• Binary opposition – gets it’s eaig fro its opposite
• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
• Jacques Lacan, psychoanalytical theory
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies – semiotics
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