Spring 2024 First-Year Writing (Barnard) BC1115 section 002

MODERNITY

Call Number 00634
Day & Time
Location
TR 10:10am-11:25am
403 Barnard Hall
Points 3
Grading Mode Pass/Fail
Approvals Required None
Instructor Andrew L Lynn
Type LECTURE
Course Description

"All that is solid melts into air." So wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, registering the astonishing pace with which daily life was being transformed around them. For them, and for many of their contemporaries, the central feature of the modern world was its ceaseless change. Under the pressure of political, scientific, and economic revolutions, traditional ways of living and thinking might disappear almost overnight, to be replaced not by a new order but instead with an unending experience of instability and dislocation.

This course reads a set of writers who both respond to and participate in that process of constant transformation – in what we have learned to call modernity. Should culture try to protect timeless values from the shock effects of modernization?  Or should it find, in change, an opportunity for new forms of life and new styles of expression?  If – as Marx and Engels did – we imagine modernity as a distinctively European event, how might writers outside of Europe make use of and respond to a modernity that excludes them? Is modernity something that happened, and is over – or are we today still swept up in it?

Readings may include: literature from Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Douglass, Woolf, Kincaid; philosophy and criticism from Montaigne, Kant, Marx, Weber, Du Bois, Kracauer, Chakrabarty.

Web Site Vergil
Department First-Year Writing @Barnard
Enrollment 15 students (15 max) as of 10:05AM Thursday, December 5, 2024
Subject First-Year Writing (Barnard)
Number BC1115
Section 002
Division Barnard College
Section key 20241FYWB1115X002