Class Notes: March 7-18

Class Notes March 7-18

Modernism

·         Disillusionment following World War I (a horrific, bloody conflict with no clear purpose)

·         A generational conflict: changes occur while soldiers are off at war (view this as a cultural betrayal)

·         Stein’s Lost Generation

·         A complete break with the past

·         Want to create an entirely new contract between author/artist and audience

·         Suspicion of the tools/techniques of their own art (platonic conception)

·         New narrative techniques: more objective, more points of view, audience is active

·         As a result we have: unreliable narrators, multiple narrators, minor characters as first person narrators, nonlinear narratives, stream of consciousness, no constant shaping for the audience, superimposition (Picasso, cubism, multiple points of view in the same space)

Post Modernism

·         Happens in America at different times (America: post WWII, Great Britain: early 1960s)

·         Partially a result of television (America gets TV first)

·         Era of unprecedented wealth and unprecedented leisure

·         New influx of ideas and ideologies

·         “all truth is local”; there is no universal truth

·         Post Modernism = Modernism – Universal Truth + Irony

·         Irony added as a self-preservation instinct

·         Blending of high and low culture (opera about Homer Simpson, etc)

·         Self-reference

·         The simulacrum

Self-Reference

·         Characters can go from place to place (Anna Karenina can show up in a videogame, etc)

·         Characters are “real” in their fictional world, so they can break the fourth wall, etc

·         Self-reinforcing mediated culture

The Simulacrum

·         Jean Beaudrillard

·         A world where a flawed copy has replaced reality

·         A simulated world that has replaced the real world

Surrealism

·         A subunit of Modernism

·         A movement in the arts between World War I and World War II

·         Uses unexpected juxtapositions in ways intended to activate subconscious associations

·         Thinking is too self-conscious

·         Psychological thought processes rather than logical thought processes

·         Comes out of French philosophy

·         “reality plus” – joins fantasy and reality

·         Freud and Jung contribute to

·         Dreamlike, playful, sometimes eerie or bizarre

·         Ex: Salvador Dali (a Surrealist), Vladimir Kush (a contemporary surrealist)


During these two weeks, we also read the poems "The Hollow Men" and revisited "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.