On Theorizing in a Postmodern State
Postmodernist stories about contemporary social transformation have at least one common organizing theme: There has been a breakdown in the metanarrative of Enlightenment. Social transformations are understood as symptoms of or episodes in this breakdown. The breakdown of this metanarrative forces philosophers to confront questions of voice, terrain, purposes, and meaning that are suspended during and by periods of consensus. To many contemporary philosophers it appears that the Enlightenment has failed. The grand ideas that structured, legitimated, and lent coherence to so much of Western science, philosophy, economics, and politics since the eighteenth century no longer appear compelling or even plausible. The Enlightenment now seems more like an inherited set of beliefs, rent by all too self-evident internal contradictions. The political and philsophical aspirations and claims typical of Enlightenment thinking appear to have been falsified by that which it was supposed to predict and yet cannot account for: the subsequent course of Western history.
Enlightenment ideas that now seem problematic include such interdependent concepts as the dignity and worth of the “monadic” (socially isolated and self-sufficient) individual and the interconnections between reason, knowledge, progress, freedom, and ethical action.–Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (7)
Required Readings
- Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism: Introduction (1-4 only) [Moodle2]
- Flax, Thinking Fragments: Ch. 1 (3-13) & Ch. 2 (14-15, 28-39) [Moodle2]
- Weedon, Ch. 7: “Feminism and Postmodernism” (170-180)
- Flax, Disputed, “Multiples: On the Contemporary Politics of Subjectivity” (92-97) [Moodle2]
- Philips, Ch. 11: “The Power of Gender Ideologies in Discourse,” (252-276), in Holmes and Meyerhoff The Handbook of Language and Gender
- Meyerhoff, Ch. 13: “Claiming a Place: Gender, Knowledge, and Authority as Emergent Properties,” (302-326), in Holmes and Meyerhoff The Handbook of Language and Gender
- Scheman, “The Body Politic/The Impolitic Body/Bodily Politics” (185-92) [Moodle2]
- Native Tongue: Chapters 16-18 (184-224)
Additional Resources
Other Works by These Authors
- Weedon, Chris
Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference - Weedon, Chris, and Glenn Jordan
Cultural Politics: class, gender, race, and the postmodern world
Due This Week
Weekly journal entry including main points from readings, major points about language treated by Elgin in Native Tongue, and observations about language from daily life.