General Introduction
– Snowpocalypse, Round Two
– Sprezzatura, sprezzatura
– Listener feedback – American folk

The Postmodern Condition
– The age of networked computers
– Incredulity toward metanarratives
– Speculation and emancipation
– What counts as knowledge(s)?
– Description or prescription

Foucault
– Structuralism begets poststructuralism
– Power manifesting itself in society
– Pessimistic description
– The myth of progress
– Webs, not lines

Derrida
– Who killed structuralism?
– And what the heck is différance?
– Language turned inside-out
– Fixing meaning, or trying to
– There is nothing outside the text
– Derrida the conservative

The Christian Rejection
– Derrida and Foucault the atheists
– Using the enemy to fight the enemy
– Historical moments
– The moral-relativism bogeyman

The Conservative Postmodernists
– The enemy of my enemy is my friend
– Make it new!
– Gadamer vs. Derrida
– Interpretation and the symphony
– Anti-universalism

The Christian Assimilation
– Throwing out the metanarratives
– Tradition and consensus
– Consumerist postmodernism
– Institutional structure

Literary Postmodernism
– Lost in the Funhouse and metafiction
– Blade Runner and the nature of a world
– Constructing the world of White Noise
– The postmodern detective story

Words of Wisdom
– Talmudic commentaries
– A Christianity under attack
– Historical moments

Our music this week is Wilco’s “Radio Cure,” from 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.