Philosophy of Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism and Hypermodernism

This course will be taught e-learning

GOALS

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This course examines Western culture and society from the 1840s to the present by focusing on the concepts of modernism, postmodernism, and hypermodernism. Students will develop appropriate critical and analytical reading skills of philosophical and interdisciplinary texts on topics such as capitalism, the concept of modernity, the death of God, cultural hegemony, the aura, the panopticon, nonplaces, cultural hybridity, globalization, youth, feminism, the post-human, democracy, and information. Furthermore, students will learn to navigate philosophical thought by addressing the following questions: What distinguishes modernism from postmodernism? How can we define the contemporary era? What is the role of capitalism in the last 200 years?

ProgramME

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I Semester

I. MODERNISM (1840s–1950s)

Kierkegaard: The Esthetic and the Ethical.

• Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II, pp. 155–205.

Marx and Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party

• Marx, and Engels, The Communist manifesto.

Baudelaire: Modernity

• Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life.

Nietzsche: The Death of God

• Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pp. 119–120.
• Heidegger, Nietxsche’s Word: “God Is Dead”.

Le Corbusier: The Modern City

• Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, second part.

Gramsci: Cultural Hegemony

• Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 5–43.

Benjamin: Aura

• Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.

Stein: Picasso

• Gertrude Stein, Picasso.

Adorno and Horkheimer: The Culture Industry

• Adorno, and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120–167.

Heidegger: The Essence of the Work of Art

• Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art.

Heidegger: Metaphysics

• Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 1–56.

II. POSTMODERNISM (1960s–1990s)

Habermas: The Public Sphere

• Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 1–56.

Rossi: The Postmodern City

• Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, pp. 20–61.

Debord: Society and Spectacle

• Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

II Semester

Hassan: Postmodern Literature

• Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus, pp. 247–271.16.

Deleuze and Guattari: Rhizome

• Deleuze, and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 11–66.17.
• Foucault: The Panopticon
• Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 195–228.

Lyotard: Knowledge

• Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, pp. 18–37.

Habermas: The Communicative Action

• Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, pp. 1–74.

Habermas: The Entry into Postmodernity

• Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 83–105.

Harvey: The Condition of Postmodernity

• David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.

McLuhan and Powers: The Global Village

• McLuhan, and Powers, The Global Village, pp. 81–143.

Jameson: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

• Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp. 1–54.

Augé: Non-Places

• Marc Augé, Non-Places.

Bhabha: Cultural Hybridity

• Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 1–27.

III. HYPERMODERNISM / HYPERCULTURE (1990s–present)

Han: Culture and Globalization

• Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture: Culture And Globalization.

Badiou: Youth

• Alain Badiou, The True Life.

Žižek: Human and Post-human

• Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void, pp. 111–147.

Han: Democracy and Information

• Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy.

Han: The Crisis of Narration

• Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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• Anderson, Perry, The Origins of Postmodernity (London; New York, NY: Verso, 1999).
• Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1993).
• Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, and David Joselit, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016).
• Haraway, Donna J., Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York, NY; London: Routledge, 1997).
• Jameson, Fredric, The Modernist Papers (London; New York, NY: Verso, 2007).

pre-requisites

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The course and readings will be entirely in English. Therefore, an intermediate knowledge of the English language is required.

TEACHERS

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Fabio Tononi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FCHS) of NOVA University of Lisbon. He teaches philosophy at the Luís Krus Centre – Lifelong Learning in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FCSH) of NOVA University of Lisbon. Tononi is Principal Investigator (PI) of an exploratory project titled IMCS – Imagination and Memory at the Intersection of Culture and Science (2023–2025), funded by CHAM. He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Edgar Wind Journal (ISSN 2785-2903), and a member of the Steering Committee of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, which is part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. His research interests include the relationship between art and cognitive neuroscience (specifically as they relate to emotion, empathy, imagination, memory, movement, and the unfinished); the writings of Aby Warburg and Edgar Wind; the essence and tasks of philosophy and science; the interconnection between art and ideology; the concepts of modernism, postmodernism, and hyperculture; Sophocles’ three Theban plays; and poetry. During his PhD, Tononi led the Aby Warburg Reading Group and Seminar at the Italian Cultural Institute in London (2020), the Seminar on Freedom and Free Will at the Warburg Institute of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London (2019–2020), and the Erasmus and Luther on Free Will Seminar at the Warburg Institute (2018–2019). In 2021, Tononi received a PhD from the Warburg Institute. In 2016, he obtained an M.A. in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture from the Warburg Institute in collaboration with the National Gallery of London. In 2013, he received an M.A. in Art History from the University of Florence. In 2010, he obtained a B.A. in Art History at the University of Parma. Since 2017, Tononi has been taking part in the masterclasses of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London. In 2012, he completed an internship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. During his career, Tononi has co-organised two conferences, chaired twelve panels, and participated in more than forty conferences and seminars in Europe and the United States. His publications include: Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment, ed. by Jaynie Anderson, Bernardino Branca and Fabio Tononi (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2024), XXIV, 408 Pages, 49 fig. col., 30 fig. b/w.; and ‘Ernst Gombrich and the Concept of “Ill-Defined Area”: Perception and Filling-In’, Journal of Art Historiography, 29: 2 (2023), pp. 1–27.

João Luís Lisboa teaches and researches in the field of cultural history and the history of ideas. He is a researcher at CHAM – Centre for the Humanities (NOVA FCSH and University of the Azores), of which he has been director since 2022. He is a member of the NOVA FCSH Faculty Council elected in 2022. In the History department, he teaches “Methodology of History”. In the Portuguese Studies department, he is responsible for a seminar, “History of the Book” in the M.A. in Text Editing and Publishing. In the Department of Sociology he has collaborated on the seminar “Women and Human Rights”.

TUITION FEES

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General Public: 500€* | NOVA FCSH 2024/2025 students (bachelors, masters and doctorates): 400 €*| NOVA FCSH Alumni/Students from other higher education institutions: 450 €*

*The school insurance will be added to the value

NUMBER OF CREDITS (UPON EVALUATION)

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• For college students: 4 ECTS  (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System).
• For students who intend to obtain ECTS, the assessment must be requested from the course teacher

assessment method

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At the end of the course, students will have to submit a short essay (max. 2,000 words, footnotes included and bibliography excluded) in English on a topic relevant to the course, on the basis of which they will be evaluated. Students are advised to agree with the teacher on the topic to choose.

ENROLLMENT

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Up to 6 business days before the start of course.

• Online through inforestudante platform

dates

I Semester

September: 20, 27.
October: 4, 11, 18, 25.
November: 1, 8, 15, 22, 29.
December: 6, 13, 20.

II Semester

February: 7, 14, 21, 28.
March: 7, 14, 21, 28.
April: 4, 11, 18, 25.
May: 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 31.