Camelia Elias

American Studies

What is postmodernism?

a period in history? a kind of writing? an attitude to these things? postmodernist theories provide a set of

terms relevant for thinking about literary and other cultural texts

post…modern

‘modernity’ indicates a mode ‘post’ indicates periodization

the postmodern distinguishes itself from the modern by creating a set of oppositions

the term ‘postmodern’ is itself a contradiction in terms

complaints about modernism postmodernists tend to think that:

more emphasis should be placed on popular forms

political praxis is more important than experimental innovation

textual gaps should be valorized rather than patterns of transcendence or aesthetic wholeness

Uses of the term "postmodern"

after modernism (subsumes, assumes, extends the modern or tendencies already present in modernism, not necessarily in strict chronological succession)

contra modernism (subverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of modernism)

equivalent to "late capitalism" (post-industrial, consumerist, and multi- and trans-national capitalism)

the historical era following the modern (an historical time-period marker)

Uses of the term "postmodern" artistic and stylistic eclecticism (hybridization of forms

and genres, mixing styles of different cultures or time periods, de- and re-contextualizing styles in architecture, visual arts, literature)

"global village" phenomena: globalization of cultures, races, images, capital, products ("information age" redefinition of nation-state identities, which were the foundation of the modern era; dissemination of images and information across national boundaries, a sense of erosion or breakdown of national, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities; a sense of a global mixing of cultures on a scale unknown to pre-information era societies)

change of dominant Epistemology knowledge

‘How can I interpret this world of which I am part?’ ‘What am I in it?’ ‘What is there to be known?’ ‘Who knows it’, ‘how do they know it’, and to what degree of

certainty?’

Ontology being ‘Which world is this?’ ‘What is to be done in it?’ ‘Which of my selves are to do it’? ‘What is a world’, and ‘what kind of worlds are there’?

(Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction, 1987)

method vs. foundation

imitate – in pre-modernism make it new – in modernism make it ‘funny’ – in postmodernism

positions

“Even though my fiction has often been labelled postmodern, and I have read many books written about postmodernism (for I am vain enough to search in every book for the mention of my name, but sardonic enough to mock my own eagerness), quite frankly I have never understood what Postmodernism was. Or as Beckett’s Unnamable once put it: To tell the truth, let us be honest at least, it is some considerable time since I last knew what I was talking about.” (R. Federman, Critifiction, 107)

Don Barthelme (1931-1989)

rejects traditional chronology, plot, character, time, space, grammar

rejects traditional distinctions between fact and fiction

language, and its complexity is the subject of writing

reference site

Donald Barthelme: The Balloon 1. Give examples of undecidable instances in the text and

comment on the effect of such demonstratives, adverbials, and implicit ellipsis, as in the sentence: "That was the situation, then".

2. How is meaning constructed in this text? On how many levels can we find the author's engagement with meaning and signification?

3. To what extent does this story offer a critique of grand narratives? Give examples of some instances.

4. How many contexts can this story be said to engage with? Are these contexts interrelated?

5. Comment on the significance of the balloon. Is the balloon symbolically, metaphorically, or literally referred to?

6. Can you relate the text to the notion of simulacra? 7. How much did you laugh, what did you laugh at, and why?

Pynchon, Thomas (1937)

novelist, known for his experimental writing techniques that involve extremely complicated plots and themes.

His most famous novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), won the National Book Award.

general themes

books portray a vast social network made up of the industrial, military, mass-communication, and entertainment systems that developed during World War II (1939-1945).

concern with the development of this network from the European roots of free enterprise, throughout the founding of the United States, to modern times.

general contexts

novels are broad in scope and use scientific theories, historical facts, and details of popular culture with great accuracy.

novels have large casts of characters through interwoven plots that are often incomplete.

novels offer a variety of narrative techniques, including satire, humor, and suspense, to paint a dark, but not hopeless, picture of society.

Where's Thomas Pynchon?

Much of Pynchon’s personal life remains a mystery. He has lived in seclusion for many years, and his academic and military records have been lost.

See the CNN report Where's Thomas Pynchon?

Pynchon in the introduction to Slow Learner: "Somewhere I had come up with the

notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite."

Pynchon on Barthelme

“…his inescapable sadness…”

“Barthelme’s was a specifically urban melancholy, related to that look of immunity to joy or even surprise seen in the faces of cab drivers, bartenders, street dealers, city editors, a wearily taken vow to persist beneath the burdens of the day and the terrors of the night. Humor in these conditions leans toward the anti-transcendent—like jail humor and military and rodeo humor, it finds amusement in failure and loss, and it celebrates survival one day, one disaster, at a time.”

Introduction, The Teachings of Don B., p. xviii

The Crying of Lot 49

Themes Legacy Conspiracy/Paranoia Roles/functions Escape from/creation of (world) Self-realization/narcissism/solipsism Reality?

thematics Executor/will/death Housewife? Boredom Defeat Sensitivity to stereotypes Cars/car owners/car salesmen Lot(s) Faces/hallucinations Psychoanalysis/trust Revelations/insulation Rapunzel/letting your hair down/escape Weaving/tapestry/world

contexts

Popular culture/media Intertextuality (Rapunzel/Remedios Varo) America in the 1960s Post-modernism Experimental realism?

Bordando el Manto Terrestre

(Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle)

What are civil rights and what are civil liberties?

Civil Rights = The right of every person to equal protection under the law and equal access to society’s opportunities and public facilities.

Civil Liberties = Individual rights that are protected from infringement by government.

Civil Liberties

The First Amendment Freedom of Religion Freedom of Speech Freedom of the Press

The Civil Rights Movement

1955 – Bus Boycott in Montgomery, AL

1957 – Little Rock, AK Desegregation

Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat

to a white man was arrested the Negro community leaders

incl. Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott (382 days of protest), which would deprive the bus company of 65% of its income

eight months later, the Supreme Court decided, based on the school segregation cases, that bus segregation violated the constitution.

sit-in campaigns, 1960

Negro students demanding to be served lunch in Greensboro, North Carolina

sit-in campaigns become a manifestation of protest against all sorts of other things

1963 Birmingham Alabama

Birmingham, Alabama was one of the most severely segregated cities in the 1960s. Black men and women held sit-ins at lunch counters where they were refused service, and "kneel-ins" on church steps where they were denied entrance.

Hundreds of demonstrators were fined and imprisoned. In 1963, ML King, the Reverend Abernathy and the

Reverend Shuttles lead a protest march in Birmingham. The protestors were met with policemen and dogs. The three ministers were arrested and taken to

Southside Jail.

Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

1963 – March in Birmingham, AL led by MLK, Jr.

1963 – March on Washington, DC.

I have a dream

1963 Marchon Washington

Despite worries that few people would attend and that violence could erupt, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin organized the historic event that would come to symbolize the civil rights movement. A reporter from the Times wrote, "no one could ever remember an invading army quite as gentle as the two hundred thousand civil rights marchers who occupied Washington."

Malcom X (1925-1965)“We declare our right on this earth…to be a

human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

“Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.”

“An integrated cup of coffee isn’t sufficient pay for four hundred years of slave labor.”

“If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”

“I am not racist in any form whatsoever. I don’t believe in any form of discrimination or segregation.”

“Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.”

Progressive Narrative Southern Baptist Multiracial and assimilationist Non-violent Media centered Student organized NAACP as legal representative

Redemptive Narrative Northern Separatist Africa as source of inspiration Slavery as ongoing Community based Confrontational

fragmenting the whole

women’s movement the pill Vietnam war’s impact on the counter-culture youth students’ protest of 1964 democratization of

curriculum (multiversity vs. university) presidents and presidential candidates are being shot

(but only the democrats die) sex, drugs, and rock and roll

creating counter-publics from free sex through expanding consciousness through drugs to mass events (Woodstock, 1969)

1968 and all that global revolt and dissent

Raymond Federman ‘To write, then, is to produce

meaning, and not reproduce a pre-existing meaning….. As such, fiction can no longer be reality, or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY – an autonomous reality whose only relation with the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth.’

Surfiction, 1975

Surfiction postmodernism

Thus the primary purpose of fiction will be to unmask its own fictionality, to expose the metaphor of its own fraudulence, and not pretend any longer to pass for reality, for truth, or for beauty. Consequently, fiction will no longer be regarded as a mirror of life, as a pseudorealistic document that informs us about life, nor will it be judged on the basis of its social, moral, psychological, commercial value….

(Federman, 1975)

Four propositions…

1. the whole traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book must be questioned, challenged, demolished. And it is the writer … who must, through innovations in the writing itself … renew our system of reading

2. linear and orderly narration is no longer possible3. there cannot be any truth nor any reality exterior to fiction.

In other words, if the material of fiction is invention (lies, simulation, distortions, or illusions), then writing fiction will be a process of inventing, on the spot, the material of fiction

4. the most striking aspects of the new fiction will be its semblance of disorder and its deliberate incoherency. …it will be deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and incoherent

The shadow of Brecht

No! to ‘identification’ Down with ‘character’! Foreground the artificiality

of the device ‘representation’ is a

political act, not an aesthetic one

Reader as producer

The writer … will stand on equal footing with the reader in their efforts to make sense out of the language common to both of them, to give sense to the fiction of life.

Authority (like paternity) is a legal fiction

Once upon a time the ‘authority’ of a text depended upon its being anonymous, collective, etc.

Now, the ‘copyright’ of bourgeois property law posits ‘authority’ in a single owner or source of value: the Author

This is a fictive construct like any other

Michel Foucault

Autobiography informed by Fiction

Fiction fiction informs life only fiction is real life comes in ‘different’

versions (therefore fictional)

fiction comes in different versions (therefore ‘true’)

memory and images are unreliable

Autobiography autobiography is a distortion of life

(uses language as a medium – unreliable)

includes selection (not the whole sequence of events) and cancellation

an invention after the fact consists of metanarrative frames:

(a writer writing on how to become a writer who is already a writer of writing stories including autobiography)

repetitive, incoherent discontinuous, fraudulent

Positions and Orientations

Autobiography is fiction that looks forward to its own future

MULTITUDES being virtual

Double or Nothing (1998)

Narrative levels Protagonist Narrator Recorder “fourth person” (i.e. the author) fifth person (real author) sixth person (reader)

characters and roles

Protagonistyouthful, acts and suffers, has a limited role

Narratorgambler, tells the protagonist’s story

Recordermiddle-aged, relays the narrative, responsible for the

typographical arrangement of the text on the page Fourth person

the author, regulates the relations among the other three

themes

gambling/writing winning/losing playing/succumbing text/world luck/knowledge “double” assumes pluralistic meanings: it refers

to concepts as well as trivial things: “double statement”, “double problem”, “double purpose”, “double time” vs. “double-ply” toilet paper, “double-breasted suit”, “double bed”, “doubled up portion”

structure

bipartite play between the introduction and the text, (and indirectly the

table of contents, as it doubles the text proper) structure and setting relate to the playing of a game that

cannot be easily broken down into such dualistic categories as text and nontext, serious and frivolous, original and parody, work and play

pattern looping and circular, not linear or binary

reversed order between THIS IS NOT THE BEGINNING and BEGINNING

stylistics

anarchic rhetoric parenthetic comments voice, person, tense position the grammatical

structures of the text and satirize hierarchized possibilities and choices

academic style follows rules of argumentation

metaphors replaced by epigramsex.000 “One must have chaos in one to give birth to a

dancing star”, 00000 “the speed of thought is not superior to that of

speech”

layout

no apparent typesetting no left-to-right, line-by-line page pattern pages lack pagination blank pages words form pictorial patterns, free verse pages crammed with English and French script emblematic

graphics, visual display and paginal space serve iconically to stand for the content

the emergence of pluralism

As movement away from the “single truth” associated with positivism occurred, room was made for the constructs of multiple realities and diversity

multiculturalism

began to be equivalent to diversity theory and provided a framework for the examination of group membership and power relationships.

3 approaches

Assimilationist• You can join us• You should join us• To join us, you need to be like usIntegrationist• We can all live together on our world• Come and join us - We will help you, “others”, come

into the mainstream, but you do not have to be like us

Incorporationist• We will transform each other for the betterment of

all.

ideas in motion

Movement away from embodied diversity to diversity of ideas

Post-positivism and post-modernism provide the scaffold to reframe thinking about human diversity.

group symmetry

does not naively posit that all groups have equal opportunity and access to resources.

an ideal that refers to the equal value and contribution of disparate groups, and their subsequent reciprocal positive transformation of multicultural environments.

inclusion

the relocation of diversity beyond the category of membership to the larger domain of diversity depth, or that of varied beliefs, ideas, and experiences that are part of human existence

the repositioning of diversity as the foundation for tolerance, transformation, and incorporation.

discursive strategies

the personal is political the personal is personal the personal is both political and personal

----- both ourselves and other people both here and some place else. identity is both socially constructed and

individual.

Andrei Codrescu (1946) Born in Sibiu, Romania on emigrated to the US in 1966 became U.S. citizen in 1981 poet, novelist, essayist,

screenwriter; columnist on National Public Radio;

editor of Exquisite Corpse, an influential literary journal

MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Codrescu’s website

translated knowledge

thematization of place translation of places vehicle: the geography of the imagination

creates a cultural text. “two set of eyes: the ones looking at the New

World from the vantage point of the old, and the ones looking at the old from the vantage point of the new”.

dualisms

sacred/profane birth/rebirth forgetting/remembering backwards vision/forward vision

nostalgia/creative imagination abandonment/abundance knowledge/information translation/transmission

Charles Simic (1939) born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, In 1953 he emigrated the

United States. His first poems were published

in 1959 In 1961 he was drafted into the

U.S. Army, and spent time in Europe

Since 1973 professor of English at the University of New Hampshire

won numerous prizes, among them the Pulitzer

Simic and the American poets

Cameo Appearance “At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a

cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.”

"Poetry and Experience"

Rita Dove (1952) born in Akron, Ohio books of poetry include

On the Bus with Rosa Parks,1999, and Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

served as Poet Laureate of the US (1993 to 1995)

Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia

Prose in a small space