CHUM214 The Modern and the Postmodern In this course we will examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last 200 years. Our readings will be drawn from a variety of areas-philosophy, novels, music, painting, and photograph...

To unify or not to unify applied psychology: That is the question. In this chapter we review pendulum swings in the historical efforts to answer this question, from a comprehensive, positivist, "top-down," deductive yes between the 1930s and the early 1960s to a postmodern no since then and until recently. We then present a rationale and proposal for a limited, "bottom-up," inductive yes, using...

Patricia D. Fox discusses in her article, "Fiction, Biography, Autobiography, and Postmodern Nostalgia in (Con)Texts of Return," the meditations, in novel and essay, of variously positioned writers and protagonists as each contemplates return to a never glimpsed or long-lost geographical and cultural center. Attempting to decipher the grounding in place and time, by heritage or tradition, Fox's...

In recent years the controversy over Drive versus Relational models of the psyche has become entangled in a philosophical controversy over epistemology. Some have argued that the Drive model was a relic of an age of positivistic science, while Relational models are a product of a postmodern condition. This paper argues that the controversy need not be a philosophical one, and that Relational vi...

CHUM214 The Modern and the Postmodern In this course we will examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last 200 years. Our readings will be drawn from a variety of areas-philosophy, novels, music, painting, and photograph...

Inspired both by the Black Arts Movement and the postmodern revolt against it, Parks hasconcentrated on crafting provocative plays that represent and emphasize the concerns andquest/ion of identities for African Americans. In the present essay, I argue that Parks isinterested in questioning the former constructed racial boundaries of blackness andrevolutionary ideologies of the ...

This paper examines the element central to the notion of the cyborg as a figure of postmodern resistance – the cyborg's celebrated politics of irony, ambiguity, hybridity and effacement. The paper contends that actual constructions of cyborgism in social practice today are emerging in forms which offer far less empowerment than postmodern narratives might hope for. In the examples looked at, th...

The relentlessly self-reflexive ways of representing reality now fashionably termed "postmodern" are flourishing in an increasingly wide range of domains. In social theory, postmodernism has been used to characterize the diverse philosophical work of such Continental post-structuralist theorists as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. Commentators have identified a multiplicity of other...

Modern general system theory proposed a holistic integrative approach based on input-state-output dynamics as opposed to the traditional reductionist detail based approach. Information complexity and uncertainty required a fuzzy system theory, based on fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. While successful in dealing with analysis, synthesis and control of technical engineering systems, general system th...