HISTORY AND POSTMODERNISM
Dr Bertrand Taithe

The course is taught in the first semester only and consists of 2 hourly tutorial classes on Tuesday Afternoon  between 3 – 5 pm in W.216. Assessment is by means of one 5,000 word essay which is double marked inter-nally and moderated by an external examiner. The essay should be submitted to Mrs Anna Bigland, Postgradu-ate Secretary, by Monday 15th January 2002. Essay questions should be formulated in consultation with the course convenor. Seminar papers will be given by students.

In the last two decades the so called 'postmodern turn' in contemporary social and cultural theory has provided a radical challenge to the practices, approaches and epistemology of the discipline of History. While some have vociferously sought to dismiss these developments, others have begun to outline new types of histories which critically engage with 'postmodernism' broadly conceived. In seeking to take stock of these debates, this course aims to introduce you to a range of theoretical and historiographical questions which can then be ex-plored at greater length both in your optional courses and your own research.

The course is divided into several sections. The first few weeks serve as a broad introduction to 'postmodern-ism', its consequences for the discourse of historical knowledge, and its reception by historians. The rest of the course considers some of the ways in which the 'postmodem turn' has influenced contemporary historical practice in the rethinking of social history, in gender history, in postcolonial history, and in science studies. From week 5 until week 11 the course alternates case studies confronting theoretical approaches and the em-pirical studies they inspired or contradicted.  The emphasis here is firmly on the practice of history.  The final session reviewing the course brings together the themes developed in the previous weeks.
 

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1:
 Introduction. Postmodernism, Postmodernity And History

Key Texts: Key texts should be read by all in the class as basic reading. Beyond this, students will be expected to read as widely as possible. Key texts are marked with an asterisk below. The texts this week are (a) from works that serve as background books for the course as a whole, and it would be useful for students to buy these (they are not in the SRC), ie Jenkins and Berkhofer:

Keith Jenkins, The Postmodem History Reader (1997), Introduction and parts I III; Frank Berkhofer, Jr, Be-yond the Great Story (1995); Patrick Joyce, ‘The return of history: postmodernism and the academic politics of ltlstory in Britain’, Past and Present Feb 1998; Peter Novick, The Noble Dream, chapter 15; L Hunt, J Ap-pleby, M Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, chs. 6, 7.
The texts this week (b) also involve consideration of the nature of postmodernism and postmodernity:

Key Texts: Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism, (Manchester University Press 1999); P. Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester University Press, 1995); R Appignanesi and Chris Garrat, Postmodernism for Beginners (Icon Books 1995) *for part II, but see whole book, and the same goes for *D Lyon, Postmodernity (Open University Press 1995), chapter 2 in SRC.

Other Texts: There are many readers on these subjects, viz:
T. Doherty (ed), Postmodernism: A Reader, especially part I on founding propositions; T Cahoone (ed), From Modernism to Postmodernism; and Joyce Appleby, et al, Postmodernism.  J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Con-dition (Manchester University Press, 1979)

On postmodernity and social theory see also Z Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (1992) chapters 2, 4 and 9; and P Joyce (ed), The Oxford Reader on Class (1995), Sections A, B.

Questions:
What are postmodernism's key ideas and thinkers? How did it emerge? What is postmodernity? What distin-guishes and links postmodernism and postmodernity? What problems are there with the use of ‘postmodern-ism’ and ‘postmodernity’? What are the implications for history of postmodernism?  How do we distinguish the aesthetic enterprise of Lyotard, Baudrillard and recent postmodern history?

Week 2: The Emergence of Cultural History & the Work of Walter Benjamin

Key Texts:

Case Study:
Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, Convolute M, Harvard University Press, 2001.
Weigel, Sigrid.   Body  and image space : re reading Walter Benjamin / translated by Georgina. – London,
Routledge, 1996.

Historiography:
*Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction’ to L.Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (1989).
*Miguel A~Cabrera, ‘Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative to Social History’ Social History, 1999.
*Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (1988), intro. *Roger Chattier, On the Edge of the Cliff, intro.
L Hunt and P Bonnell (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999).
Raphael Samuel, ‘Reading the Signs’, I and II, in History Workshop Joumal, 32 (Autumn
1991):88 109; and 33 (Spring 1992):220 51.
P Novick, That Noble Dream, ch. 15.
Grossberg, Nelson, Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1992
Buck Morss, Susan.   The dialectics of seeing : Walter Benjamin and the Arcades project.   Cambridge,
Mass.; London : MIT Press, 1989.

Questions:
A consideration of Benjamin’s work and its importance for the history and understanding of the meanings of culture.
What is signified by the term 'cultural history’? why has it emerged? What is its relationship to the debates about history and postmodernism? What is its relationship to social and political history? What are the limita-tions of cultural history?

Week 3:  The Rhetoric of History and ‘What is an Author?’

Key Texts:
*Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’ in his The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987).
*Michel de Certeau, ‘History: Science or Fiction?’ in his Heterologies: The Discourse on the Other (1986).
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in Foucault : a critical reader / David Couzens Hoy, editor. - Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1986 or in The Foucault reader / edited by Paul Rabinow. - London : Penguin, 1991.
Michel Foucault (ed.), I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brothe, - Lincoln (Neb.) : Universityof Nebraska Press, 1982
*Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff.' History, Language and Practices (1997), Pt. 1 Fiction and Knowl-edge.
*J Appleby, L Hunt and M Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994): 231 237 and ch.7.

Other Texts:
Jenkins, The Postmodem History Reader, Pt. II and Pt. IV (Friedlander, White, Kellner).
Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’ Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991):773 97.
Anthony Easthope, ‘Postmodernism and the Historians: Romancing the Stone’ Social History, 18, 2 (1993):235 49.
Lloyd S.Kramer, ‘Literature, Criticism and Historical Imagination’ in L.Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History.
Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983), ch.2. D Attridge, et al. (eds.), Post Structuralism and the Question of History (1987), esp. essay by Mark Cousins.
James Vernon, ‘Narrating the constitution: the discourse of 'the real' and the fantasies of nineteenth century constitutional history’ in Vernon (ed.), Re-Reading the Constitution (1996):204 38.
Linda Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca, 1990).
Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History (1992), pt.1 and 4.

Questions:
Is history science or fiction (or neither)? How might we analyse, and what is at stake in, the rhetoric of His-tory? Do we need to escape the rhetorical tropes of the discipline of History?

Week 4: The Archive and the Lieux de Mémoire

Key Texts:
*Thomas Osborne, ‘The Ordinariness of the Archive ‘, in History of the Human Sciences’, vol 12, no 12, May 1999.
Raphael Samuel, Island Stories REFS
Pierre Nora, Introduction to vol 3, Realms of Memory
Introduction and Forward to Pierre Nora (ed) Reasons of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol 1, ‘Conflict and Divisions’.
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning REFS
George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers REFS
Edmund Husserl,
Husserl, Edmund, - The phenomenology of internal time-consciousness / edited by Martin
Heidegger - Bloomington; London : Indiana University Press, 1964.
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. - Philosophical fragments,  Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1985.
 

Other Reading:
The reading this week is based upon the double number on ‘The Archives’ in History of the Human Sciences, vol 11, no 4, November 1998; vol 2, no 2, May 1999. All of the contents of the double number should be read, in particular:
Part 1   Marcus on the ‘ethnographic archive’; Steedman on being in an archive; Myerson on the ‘electronic archive’; and Part 2   Caygill on memory and the archive, Joyce on ‘the liberal archive’, Taithe on Nora and Samuel.

Questions:
In what sense are archives political institutions? If archives are political what does this say about the ‘objec-tivity’ of history? What is the relationship between the archive and the nation? the archive and empire? the ar-chive and liberalism? and the archive and the internet?
What is a lieu de mémoire? What is memory ?
 

Week 5: Gender and the Separate Spheres in British History: A case Study 1.
(Dr Hannah Barker)
This session will be jointly taught with the Modern British History MA under the direction of Hannah Barker.

Key Texts:
Butler, Gender as performance
 
 
 
 

Week 6: Essay discussion.
There will be joint class discussion of students' proposed essay topics, the aim being to work out essay contri-butions in a collaborative way.

Week 7: Case Study 2: The History of Sexuality & the British Experience
(Dr Harry Cocks)

Key Texts:
a) Michel Foucault, “We Other Victorians” and “The Repressive Hypothesis,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London 1991): 292-330.
Or, (much the same material)
b) Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.1, esp. pp. 1-49; 92-114.

Essentialism v Constructionism
Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters: Rethinking Sexuality in History,” in Duberman, Chauncey, Vicinus (eds.), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past: 54-66.
John Boswell, “Concepts, Experience and Sexuality,” differences, 2, 1 (1990): 67-87.
David Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality,” History and Theory, 23, 3 (1989): 257-274.  (also in Abe-love et al (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, (New York, 1990): 416-431.

General
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (London, 1992)
David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography
Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role,” Social Problems, 16, 2 (Fall 1968): 182-192, also in Peter M. Nardi and Beth E. Schneider, Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies (London, 1998): 68-76.
John D’Emilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Abelove et al (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London, 1993): 467-478.
Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality (London, 1990) pp. 19-44.
Jeffrey Weeks, “Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance: Some Problems in a History of Homosexuality,” in Ken Plummer, (ed.), The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London, 1981): 76-111.
Ken Plummer, “Building a Sociology of Homosexuality,” in Ken Plummer, (ed.), The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London, 1981): 17-29.
Jan Lofstrom, “The Birth of the Queen/The Modern Homosexual: Historical Explanations Revisited,” The So-ciological Review, 45 (February 1997): 24-41.
Martha Vicinus, “Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?” Radical History Review 60 (1994): 57-75.

Queer Theory
Donna Penn, “Queer: Theorizing Politics and History,” Radical History Review, 62, 24 (1995): 24-42.
Website on queer theory www.theory.org.uk
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century, Intro, ch 1.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (New York, 1989), pp. 1-48.
Teresa De Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction’, Differences, 3, 2 (1991): ii xviii.
Steven Seidman (ed.), Queer Theory/Sociology (1996).

On Foucault
Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (London, 1997) ch 4.
Gary Gutting, A Cambridge Companion to Foucault, (Cambridge, 1994).
Jeffrey Weeks, “Foucault for historians,” in Weeks, Making Sexual History (London, 1999): 106-122.
Lois McNay,  Foucault, (Oxford, 1994), ch 3.
Foucault Websites-www.theory.org.uk and “Swirl” (see my webpage under “Theory Links”).
Key Texts:

Other
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, 1990).
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of’Sex’ (1993), esp. ch. 8.
Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism'‘ in J Butler and J Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political (1992).

Questions:
Why has sexuality become a subject of critical inquiry?  How influential has Foucault been in making
Sexuality a significant critical idiom?  Is he right?  Are debates about sexuality politically important?  What is queer theory?  What role has queer theory played?  Is it better to use Dollimore’s term “sexual dissidence” to understand the place of sexuality in history.
 

Week 8: The History of the Body
This section considers the possibility of writing a history of body and a history of modernity and the body.

Key text:
George Canguilhem, On the normal and the pathological,  Dordrecht : Reidel, 1978.
A vital rationalist : selected writings from Georges Canguilhem / edited
By François Delaporte - New York : Zone Books, 1994

Other texts:
Armstrong, David, 1947-. - Political anatomy of the body : medical knowledge in Britain in the twentieth Century, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1983
R. Cooter & J. Pickstone, Medicine in the twentieth century / -  Harwood Academic, 2000.
Laqueur, Thomas Walter. - Making sex : body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. - Cambridge, Mass.;
London : Harvard University Press, 1990.
Feher, Michel. - Fragments for a history of the human body, Zone Books, Vols 1-3, 1989.
T. Laqueur & Gallagher (eds) The Making of the modern body : sexuality and society in the nineteenth century - Berkeley; London : University of California Press, 1987.

Further readings:
Colin Jones, Roy Porter eds,  Reassessing Foucault : power, medicine and the body, London : Routledge,
1994.
Seltzer, Mark. - Bodies and machines. - New York; London : Routledge, 1992.
Sennett, Richard, 1943-. - Flesh and stone : the body and the city in Western civilization. - London :
Faber, 1994.
Anson Rabinbach, The human motor : energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity. - Berkeley :
University of California Press, 1992.

Questions: Using the work of Canguilhem how useful is any discussion of normality and normalisation?  What are the limitation of a history of representations of the body?  When is a body metaphor not a metaphor?  Can we define the history of the body through scientific texts?

Week 9:  CASE STUDY 3:
Foucault And The History of the Subject And Power: Discipline and Punish using a British Perspective.

This session aims to look at the impact of Michel Foucault on studies of reformist movements of the nine-teenth century, on penal reform for instance and the rise of ‘liberal’ modes of government.

Key Theoretical Texts:
The subject: *P Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader (1994), Introduction, 3 31 and Sex and Truth (extracts from Foucault) in Rabinow, 291 331.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish Especially introduction.
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1.

Empirical studies:
Vic Gatrell, The Hanging Tree
Michael Ignatieff, A just measure of pain : the penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750-1850. -
London (etc.) : Macmillan, 1978.
Melossi, Dario, 1948-. - The Prison and the factory : origins of the penitentiary system / translated. -
London : Macmillan, 1981.
Sim, Joe. - Medical power in prisons : the prison medical service in England 1774-1989. - Milton Keynes
: Open University Press, 1990.
Semple, Janet. - Bentham's prison : a study of the panopticon penitentiary. - Oxford : Clarendon Press,
1993
Philip Priestley ed., Victorian prison lives : English prison biography 1830-1914 / London : Methuen, 1985

Further Theoretical Texts:
*M Foucault, ‘Governmentality’ in G Burcheil, et al, The Foucault Effect (1991)
*A Barry, T Osborne (eds) Foucault and Political Reason (1996), 1 37;

Jan Goldstein (ed), Foucault and the Writing of History (1994), part II and IV (especially chapter 10),
K M Baker, ‘A Foucauldian French Revolution’, copy in SRC; Mitchell Deane, Critical and Effective Histo-ries: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (1994);
T Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’ in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (1994), eds N Dirks and G Eley, (copy in SRC).

Questions:

How do we contrast a Foucaultian model with empirical approaches of penal reform?  Discuss the Benthamite ideals and their evolution?  Can the panopticon really stand as a metaphor for modern liberal government?
What does the postmodernist concern with subjectivity involve? In what ways has the history of western sub-jectivities been written by Foucault and others? What is the relationship between power and knowledge in Foucault? What does ‘governmentality’ mean, and what forms has it taken in the west? How is liberalism one of these forms?
 
 

Week 10: HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE (Dr lan Burney)

In recent years ‘Science Studies’ has emerged as a dynamic branch of contemporary critical theory. Among its core concerns is the examination of the conditions for production, dissemination, and validation of scientific knowledge. In seeking to question the traditional internalist account of scientific progress (with its emphasis on purposeful and orderly examination of natural phenomena conducted within its own insulated space), this model examines science as contingent and negotiated practice. The core reading for this seminar focuses on two historical applications of science studies (one early modem, one modem), which will both serve as an in-troduction to the field's methods and concerns and as a way of assessing its possible uses for cultural history more broadly construed.

Key Texts:
*Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions for the Progress of Rea-son’, Social Science Information, 14 (1975).
*Bruno Latour, ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the World’, in K Knorr and M Mulkay, Science Ob-served: Perspectives on the Social study of Science (1983).
*Steve Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science 14 (1984).

Further Reading:
Mario Biagiolo (ed), Science Studies Reader (1999).
Mario Biagiolo (ed), ‘Galileo the Emblem Maker’, Isis, 81 (1990).
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason’, Sociological Forum 6 (1991). Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations 40 (1992). Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Devel-opment of a Scientific Fact (1935).
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985).
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions (1989).
Bruno Latour, Science in Action (1987).
Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (1988).
John Pickstone, ‘Museological Science? The place of the analytical/comparative in nineteenth century science, technology and medicine’, History of Science 32 (1994).
Gayan Pra;kash, ‘Science 'gone native' in colonial India’, Representations (1992).
Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemenly Specialists (1985).
Steve Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994).
Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985).
Mary Poovey, A History of the Modem Fact (1999).

Week 11: The Nation And Postcolonial History
(Dr Natalie Zacek)

Key Texts:
*Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’ American Historical Review, 99, 5 (1994): 147 90.
*Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), esp. chs. 1 3. *Dipesh Chak-rabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?’ Representations, 37 (1992): 1 26.

Other Texts:
Edward Said, Orientalism (1993 ed) intro and afterword.
Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), esp.intro, 4,9,12.
Bill Ashcroft et al (eds.), The Post Colonial Studies Reader (London, 1995), esp. Pt. 1.
Robert Young, White Mythologies. Writing, History_ and the West (London, 1990) chs. 1,7 9. Gayatri Chak-ravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London, 1987).
R Guha and G Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (1988), esp intro.
Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing Post Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiogra-phy’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32, 2 (1990):383 408.

Questions:
How have post colonial historians sought to recast the history of colonialism? What is at stake in the postcolo-nial critique of the category of the nation?
 

Week 12: Course Review