Bachelor of Arts - Contemporary Critical Theory

The term “critical theory” has traditionally been identified with the critiques of modernity offered by Frankfurt School theorists, especially Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, but also Walter Benjamin.

More recently the term has been widened to encompass the ideas of a broad range of theorists who have exploded the boundaries between various established academic disciplines to produce a supradisciplinary discourse to approach the contemporary moment’s central social, political, cultural, and aesthetic questions. Combining philosophy, social theory, cultural critique, and political commitment, this body of thought has at once arisen out of the conditions of modernity (and, for some, postmodernity) while providing a critique of its central concepts and are-visioning of its assumptions about truth, progress, representation, subjectivity, identity, rationality, meaning, language, and power. Courses in this concentration, while differing topically, forefront theory and its historical, cultural, and intellectual context.

They familiarize students with the assumptions, history, and methods of several strands of contemporary critical thought, including structuralist, semiotic, poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist theory.