Page 1 - summer 22

Verwood U3A History Group: 2021 – 2022
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MODERN PARADISE: Stories of culture, war and revolution in the 20 century

Introduction:
1. Shape of the century, wars and rebirth

Part One: Culture
2. Modernism and the shock of the new
Picasso, Kandisky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Le Corbusier, Eisenstein)

3. Critical Theory, culture and the crisis of Marxism
(Gramsci, Odorno, the Frankfurt School, hegemony)
4. Popular culture and the early history of recorded music
Presentation by Dave Timpson illustrated with extracts from his collection
5. Popular culture, art or consumption?
(Cultural hegemony, film, television, sport)
6. The critique of reason and the politics of identity

The critique of reason, new constituencies, populism, liberal democracy
7. Postmodernism and hyperreality
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(Lyotard, Baudrillard, metanarratives, 20 century architecture)

Part Two: War
8. Fascism: origins and meaning
(Mussolini, futurism, Hitler, ideology and opportunism)
9. Appeasement: Austen and Neville Chamberlain

(The legacy of Versailles, facing the dictators, Locarno to Munich)
10. Second World War: the moral conflict
(Moral ambiguities, the price of victory)
11. The Cold War era
(The Cold War, Decolonisation, nationalism, the bomb)

Part Three: Revolution
12. The Health Revolution
(Beveridge, health and welfare revolutions, demographic transition)
13. The Sixties: was there a “Sixties Revolution”?
(Legacy, debates, TV, presentation by Dave Timpson: music in the Sixties)
14. Space: the final frontier
(Presentation by Tony Wilson, melting into air, shock of the old)
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15. The 20 Century: the century of women?
(Putting women back into history, reflections by Audrey Jacobs, Suffragettes, Simon
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de Beauvoir, second-wave feminism; 20 century concluded)