1. Camelia Elias American Studies

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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)

6. 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)

7. 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)

8. method vs. foundation  imitate – in pre-modernism  make it new – in modernism  make it ‘funny’ – in postmodernism

9. 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)

10. 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 reference site

11. 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?

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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? Where's Thomas Pynchon?

16. 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."

17. 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

18. The Crying of Lot 49 Themes  Legacy  Conspiracy/Paranoia  Roles/functions  Escape from/creation of (world)  Self-realization/narcissism/solipsism  Reality?

19. 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

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

21. Bordando el Manto Terrestre (Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle)

23. 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.

24. Civil Liberties  The First Amendment  Freedom of Religion  Freedom of Speech  Freedom of the Press

25. The Civil Rights Movement 1955 – Bus Boycott in Montgomery, AL 1957 – Little Rock, AK Desegregation

26. 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.

27. 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

28. 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.

29. Martin Luther King (1929-1968) 1963 – March in Birmingham, AL led by MLK, Jr. 1963 – March on Washington, DC. I have a dream

30. 1963 March on 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."

31. 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.”

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

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

34. 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

35. 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

36. 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)

37. 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 possible 3.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

38. 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

39. 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.

40. 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

41. 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

42. Positions and Orientations  Autobiography is fiction that looks forward to its own future  MULTITUDES  being virtual being virtual

43. Double or Nothing (1998) Narrative levels  Protagonist  Narrator  Recorder  “fourth person” (i.e. the author)  fifth person (real author)  sixth person (reader)

44. characters and roles  Protagonist  youthful, acts and suffers, has a limited role  Narrator  gambler, tells the protagonist’s story  Recorder  middle-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

45. 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”

46. 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

47. 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 epigrams  ex.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”

48. 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

49. 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

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

51. 3 approaches Assimilationist You can join us You should join us To join us, you need to be like us Integrationist 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.

52. 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.

53. 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.

54. 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.

55. 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.

56. 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 journalExquisite Corpse  MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.  Codrescu’s websitewebsite

57. 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”.

58. dualisms  sacred/profane  birth/rebirth  forgetting/remembering  backwards vision/forward vision  nostalgia/creative imagination  abandonment/abundance  knowledge/information  translation/transmission

59. 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

60. Simic and the American poets  Cameo Appearance 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"

61. 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 Prose in a small space