Copyright, 1996 © Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc.

Chapter 35: Quest for Meaning

Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko

Humanities 103

Instructor Beth Camp

Challenge questions:

What is existentialism?How did this philosophy affect literature

and art? Option: Investigate any specific writer or

artist that appeals to you. Write a paper or journal entry defining existentialism in your own words. Select 2-3 works from this chapter and discuss how they reflect “existentialist” ideas.

Sartre and Existentialism

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) proposed that people make choices which then create their identity (We are the sum total of all of our actions)

Sartre and Existentialism

Because people must make choices at every point in their lives, Sartre says we are “condemned to be free”

Because each choice has implications for others, Sartre says we all have total responsibility for humanity – and seek meaning in a meaningless world

Utopians Dystopians

Humans can create a perfect society

Technology will free us from the drudgery of labor

“We are what we have been born into, what we have been conditioned to be” (environment determines human behavior)

Imperfect humans cannot create a perfect society

Technology threatens us with a loss of freedom

“We are what we choose to be” (but environment influences human behavior)

Literature at Mid-Century

Sartre’s anti-hero, in spite of uncertainty about life or God or tradition, decides to behave morally, facing down absurd reality Camus, The Stranger Absurdist theater: Beckett’s Waiting for

Godot, Edward Albee, The Zoo Story Western Poetry: T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas Hindu Poetry: Rabindranath Tagore

Theater of the Absurd

Life is meaninglessLife is inescapability arbitrary and absurdReality has no meaning or moral orderHow do humans respond? “Recognize

your dignity as a human being” (Fiero 74)How are these ideas revealed in

Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959)?

Edward Albee, The Zoo Story

Albee describes his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Source: Edward Albee

T. S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

    S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo Non tornò viva alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

  "If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth,this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returnedalive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy." --from Dante’s Inferno

What does this epigraph add to the poem?

Dylan Thomas

A Welshman first, a drunkard second

Rabindranath Tagore

“If we spend our livespursuing comfort, what do we gain?”

“Are works of art both meaningless and

essential?”

BeautyCreativityHarmony

India: Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal criticized “injustice, godlessness, and false ideals” which he saw as responsible for “failing Western morality”

He wanted Muslims to replace “contemplation and withdrawal” from society with “a modern doctrine of choice and action” Why?

--Fiero (79)

What is Abstract Expressionism?

Action painting

Non-geometric Abstraction

Automatic art (Surrealism)Color field artists

Willem de Kooning, 1904-1977

Dutch, original group of Abstract Impressionists

Influence of cubism, surrealism and something new – abstractions Extreme fragmenting of form Proportion exaggerated

He called his paintings of women “the female painted through all ages . . . All those idols”

Willem de Kooning

Woman (1954)

Jackson Pollock

Best known of abstract expressionistsPoured paintings, “action” paintings

Pollack

Male and Female (1946)

“It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique”

Pollock: Lavender Mist, No. 1 (1950)

Mark Rothko

Closely identified with New York SchoolCreated new form of abstract expressionismMost interested in FORMAL ELEMENTS of art:

Color Shape Balance Depth Composition Scale

Rothko

Yellow Band (1949)

“It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them, and if you . . . are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

What’s Next?

Read Chapter 35 (pages 70-92) Bring your reactions to ONE painting and ONE poem

Read Chapter 36 (pages 93-125). Choose ONE group to report on and bring your reactions to ONE work of art and ONE writing (Black Americans, Women, Gays, or Hispanics)

Sources: Mark Harden, www.artchive.com