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· It is rooted in the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason in the 18th C, Rene Descartes' philosophy, lasting until the mid-twentieth C.
· It stems from the Latin word modo, meaning 'just now'.
· Objective reality, rational truth can be discovered through science.
· Objective reality is compared to a map and human being to a scholar who is supposed to discover truth by investigating the map.
· Reason and science are humankind's guide towards truth.
· Monism, Objectivism, Absolutism, Rationalism, Essentialism, Empiricism
· Humanistic: human/non-human, the former being the privileged.
· Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) exemplifies the archetypal figure of modernity.
· Philological, mimetic, and diachronic view to language.
· Logocentrism, Phonocentrism, conventionally accepted binary oppositions.
· Reliability of knowledge or episteme
· either/or pattern of meaning
· High culture, intellectualism, esotericism, eliticism, authoritarianism
· A view of art as an aesthetic, ontological entity superior to other practices
· New Criticism and early Formalism
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· It is rooted in the late 19th C. Structuralism of Ferdinande de Saussure but later an expansion and a critique of it.
· It stems from the Latin root 'after modernity' or 'just after now'.
· There is no such thing as objective reality. Truth is subjective, relative, ambiguous and fragmentary. Many truths exist, nor the truth.
· Reality is like a collage that is always changing, and permits many possible meanings in whose production the viewer participates.
· Language is the key to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Due to post-war disillusionment, role of science in building an objective truth lost its favour.
· Pluralism, Perspectivism, Scepticism, Relativism
· Anti-humanistic ('death of Man' thus 'death of the author'), dismantling of human/non-human dichotomy.
· pioneered by Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God and simultaneously demise of ultimate truth, Derrida's deconstructionism and Foucault's theory of discourse and power.
· Linguistic, differential, and synchronic plus diachronic conception of language
· Graphocentrism, decentring western philosophy and metaphysics of presence, and reversing naturalized binary oppositions.
· Inherent unreliability, arbitrariness, and instability of knowledge and of discourses.
· and/both pattern of signification
· An interest in popular culture, mythology, fantasy, anti-authoritarianism
· Art being equal to other discourses; dissolution of art and literature
· A diversity of critical theories: Cultural Materialism, sub-altern studies, Feminism, Queer Theory
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