Hassan’s list:

Today as a follow up to the conversation about the Master Narrative projects we dove into the Hassan essay. This is really the first deep dive into postmodern theory. The Postmodernism book provided a good road map, but this essay is on a different level. I’d been thinking for some time that we needed to change our relationship to the space. Students tend to come into the room and plop down in the first available seat near the door. I was delighted to find all the chairs sort of scattered at odd angles in the middle of the space. Something I would have done if I had been able to get there before the students. I didn’t but they assumed I had anyway. Quite fortuitous. So – we started the day with an Olipo game in which you take a sentence and remove all the vowels and create a new sentence. Always fun. For the first time a group created a sentence of nonsense words – great choice.

After that we settled down and I asked each student to articulate one thing that caught their eye in the reading – about 2/3rds had something to share, the other 1/3^rd hadn’t done the reading. It was nine pages. What I like about this is not just calling out people who aren’t participating – it is often the students who seem disengaged – go figure – but that students often see things in the reading I didn’t. It opens the conversation up to a wider range of ideas than just what is in my notes. Then we moved on to chat about the Self, Society, and Cosmos ideas and how they relate to postmodernism. Some great observations about authority and truth and how postmodernism needs modernism to have something to push against. The one question that caught me off guard was about the relationship of postmodernism to religion. Since SSC carries with it a fairly high concentration of religious ideas students seemed perplexed that the same conversation didn’t continue into this class. It was honestly the first time that has come up in teaching this subject for more than a decade. It will require some research, thinking, and perhaps posing students more questions. Seems interesting that we are set to watch Monty Python’s Holy Grail – which takes on one of the most canonical Christian stories of all time. Perhaps we can touch on how Python approaches it in the follow up conversation. If only I had decided to use Life of Brian instead.