American Postmodern Cultures 4219-SK0001
The course traces the history of one of the most contested terms in recent intellectual history. Beginning with a narrow group of postwar American writers — Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis — the course follows postmodernism as it expanded beyond literature into theory, architecture, film, and economic thought, reshaping how we think about culture, reality, identity, and politics. Each version of postmodernism — the collapse of high and low culture, hyperreal simulation, the fragmented self, the posthuman body, the exhaustion of irony — is approached through both theoretical texts and artworks that themselves became pop-cultural phenomena, including the feature films Blue Velvet, The Truman Show, Fight Club, The Matrix, Adaptation, and Ex Machina. The course ends where postmodernism ends — or fails to end. The final classes ask whether its stereotypical features — the collapse of objective truth, the delegitimation of expertise, the preference for performance over substance — have returned as something far less playful in contemporary politics.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
Knowledge:
* Student has knowledge of the history and theory of American postmodernism and its key intellectual currents
* Student is able to define the main concepts of postmodern culture — simulation, hyperreality, the fragmented self, the posthuman — and can apply them in critical discourse
* Student identifies the major turning points in the development of postmodernism (literary, theoretical, cinematic) and explains their cultural significance
Skills:
* Student can read and analyze literary texts, theoretical writings, and films using relevant critical methods (semiotics, discourse analysis, cultural theory)
*Student identifies different manifestations of postmodernism across media and cultural forms and situates them within the broader historical development of the movement
*Student identifies the ways in which postmodern culture represents and destabilizes categories of identity, truth, and reality
*Student develops the ability to gather, select, and structure arguments in order to defend a critical position
*Student approaches texts and artworks from the discipline with analytical rigor and independence
Social competences:
* Student participates in group discussion and is able to contribute to collective critical inquiry
* Student develops critical media literacy in order to recognize postmodern strategies in contemporary culture, politics, and media
* Student is prepared for conscious and reflective engagement with cultural texts and their political implications
Assessment criteria
1. Final test (50%)
2. Active participation (50%)
Grading: 100%-90%/5; 89%-80%/4.5; 79%-70%/4; 69%- 60%/3.5; 59%-50%/3; 49%-0%/2;
Bibliography
Movies:
Adaptation (2002)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Fight Club (1999)
The Truman Show (1999)
The Matrix (1999)
Ex Machina (2014)
Texts:
William Gass, „The Medium of Fiction” (1970)
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra” (1981),
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984)
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)
Henry Louis Gates, “Whose Canon Is It Anyway?” (1989)
David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993)
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010)
Michiko Kakutani, excerpts from Death of Truth (2018)