Week

Topic

Assignment

Resources

1.

Erasure of Boundaries

Discuss how the real and the unreal come together in A Scanner Darkly.

Jameson

2.

Simulation and Simulacra

Discuss the lives of the characters in a work of your choice as simulacra.

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

http://www.uta.edu/english/timothyr/Baudrillard.pdf

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~carlos/607/readings/baudrillard.pdf

3.

Simulation and Simulacra

Discuss the simulation of piety in the media in the ramzan special transmission. 

4.

Consumer culture

We are human billboards promoting and showing off products. Discuss consumer culture by taking yourself and your acquaintances as examples.

5.

Death of Metanarratives

In what ways according to Lyotard has the very notion of knowledge changed in the postmodern world?

OR

Choose any two genres to show how the death of metanarratives is reflected in them.

The Postmodern Condition

Jean Francois Lyotard

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Lyotard-PostModernCondition1-5.html

6.

Death of Metanarratives

7.

Waning of Effect, Pastiche

Fredric Jameson

http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/JamesonPostmodernism.pdf

8.

Postmodern Paranoia

Discuss the lead character’s paranoia in The Taxi Driver.