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HIST384: 'The Passion for the Real': Historical Imagination and Modern Life, 1850 - Present

Special Subject (60 credits)

“He who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”, wrote George Orwell in 1949. Using the past in this manner emerged together with modern historical consciousness and the shared reality of contemporary mass culture. This module will trace the story of their development, from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. Such a story is encapsulated in a new orientation to everyday life, which the French philosopher Alain Badiou describes as ‘the passion for the real’.
Why does history matter? How does historical content create historical perspectives? What role did historical perception play in forming the modern individual? How was this type of awareness activated and for what purpose? How do we live historically informed lives? These are some of the questions that will be posed. We will consider various answers by engaging thinkers, such as Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Simmel, Benjamin and Foucault, learning about their approaches to history, and how these were used to understand the characteristic challenges of modern life. Throughout we will investigate how history at one point became an indispensible component of social understanding.

Teaching Arrangements: All Special Subjects in the History department operate on the basis of 66 hours of official teaching contact, equivalent to 3 hours per week over a period spanning 22 weeks (10 weeks in Michaelmas Term of year 3, 10 weeks in Lent Term of year 3, and 2 weeks [revision seminars] in Summer Term of year 3), plus individual consultations. Working within the 66-hour overall figure, teaching approaches will vary due to the specialist nature of the courses.

For further information on HIST384 visit the Lancaster University Online Courses Handbook.

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