ELIT 48C: Class # 17

We will discuss this when your father gets home!

Wow! Will he last

longer in that

outfit?

Farther versus Further

Farther versus Further Farther is an adjective and adverb that means to

or at a more distant point: “We drove 50 miles today; tomorrow, we will travel 100 miles farther.”

Further is an adjective and adverb that means to or at a greater extent or degree: “We won't be able to suggest a solution until we are further along in our evaluation of the problem.” It can also mean in addition or moreover: “They stated further that they would not change the policy.”

Read more: Easily Confused or Misused Words | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0200807.html#ixzz2TkpRfHLG

“the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothedblindness to a naked vision”- Dylan Thomas

AGENDA

Lecture: Postmodernismo Postmodern Manifestos

Lecture: Invisible Mano “Prologue”

What is postmodernism? the experimental aesthetic movements of the post–

World War II era a multi-faceted engagement with modernist aesthetics

and philosophy a rejection of modernism a continuation of the “unfinished project” of modernism a self-critical reflection on modernism

From Modernism to Postmodernism

Rejects 19th-century sociological realism and 20th-century psychological realism

Considers history and fiction both as products of the imagination

Questions whether literature can represent reality

Focuses self-reflexively on language itself

Postmodern Fiction

A shift from the poem as artifact to the poem as open-ended process

An increasing emphasis on the unconscious, accident, and chance

A growing focus on the body, gender, and women’s experiences

A greater sense of the poet’s personal life reflected in the poetry itself

Postmodern Poetry

QHQs Mary Klages1.Am I the only person who doesn’t understand postmodernism

after reading this article?2.What separates Postmodernism from modernism?3.Can we understand postmodernism without modernism?4.Is Postmodernism an improvement on Modernism?5.How can you simplify Postmodernism? How would analyzing

postmodernist work be different than examining modernism?6.How does postmodernism rejects grand narratives in favor for

mini-narratives?7.Even though Postmodernism occurs after modernism, why

does postmodernism focus more on the ideologies of the past rather than developing new interpretations?

8.How has communication changed in a postmodern society?9.How does post-modernism “Play with nonsense”?

1. How, when regarding the ideal sense of ‘self’, is postmodernism superior to modernism?

2. What are your thoughts on the idea of creating (or identifying) “order,” and the necessity that in doing such we must also create or identify “disorder”? In what ways do you identify disorder, and in what ways do you create disorder?

3. What happens when there is too much information(articles) in the internet? How does it affect the postmodernist movement in sorting through the noise?

4. Is postmodernism redefining how knowledge should be utilized?

5. Postmodernism believes anything not “storable by a computer–i.e. anything that’s not digitizable–will cease to be knowledge”. Do you agree?

6. Are we living with postmodernism? Or are we living with modernism?

7. Are we still in a postmodernism movement or are we in a new unnamed movement?

Group Discussion: Postmodern Manifestos

“For Sukenick [. . .] fiction was above all an activity, a self-conscious act of creating a literary work with no illusions abut the nature of its making” (NAAL 401).

“Fiction is the most fluid and changing of literary forms, the one that most immediately reflects the changes in our collective consciousness, and in fact that is one of its great virtues. As soon as fiction gets frozen into one particular model, it loses that responsiveness to our immediate experience that is its hallmark. […] It seems to me that this is one of the major factors contributing to the recent decline in the popularity of fiction: people no longer believe in the novel as a medium that gets at the truth of their lives” (402).

Ronald Sukenick

QHQ: Sukenick 1. When a new novel is published, how does

it turn from being experimental to progressive?

2. How has fictional writing changed throughout the years?

3. What does Sukenick mean when he states that “no one takes novels seriously until they become movies”?

William H. GassGass– what is the flaw in fiction writing?

“.. the moment our writer concentrates on sound, the moment he formalizes his sentences, the moment he puts in a figure of speech or turns a phrase, shifts a tense or alters tone, the moment he carries description, or any account, beyond need, he begins to turn his readers interests away from the world which lies among his words like a beautiful woman among her slaves, and directs him toward the slaves themselves.”

QHQ: Gass1. When William Gass says “In literature… we return to [signs]

again and again” is he proud of it or does he lament it?

2. When Gass ends his essay with “Are you afraid?” what does he mean? Afraid of what?

3. What qualities, in specific, distinguish postmodern literature from modern literature? How do we see these in Gass’s manifesto?

4. Why does Gass’ writing form have the occasional, recurring grammar errors?

5. According to Gass, how do concepts convey meaning?

6. What is a new novel? How do we create one? Will there be a point where people will no longer be able to write new novels?

“On the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.” (408).

Hunter S. Thompson

“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing”

“But nobody can handle that other trip—” (408).

QHQ: Thompson1. What did I just read?

2. Why is the fear and loathing in the manifestos?

3. What does Las Vegas represent to Thompson and why does he choose this as a setting for his novel?

4. What does Thompson portray about human nature and why does Thompson imply that he has had enough of people’s capacity for idiocy?

5. What elements of post-modernism exist in the excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Anthology?

“(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it” (409).

“(2) the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition”

“FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (410).

(3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished

“ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (410).

Charles Olson

QHQ Olson

1. How important is movement and energy in poetry according to Charles Olson?

2. What is the best similarity in the postmodern manifestos among the poets, Olson, O’hara, Bishop, Ammons, and Lorde?

FRANK O’HARA In “Personism,” O’Hara defines

the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. “I went back to work and wrote

a poem for [a person I was in love with]. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement . . . which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.”

QHQ O’Hara

O’Hara seems sarcastic in a way about his ‘creation of personism’. Is O’Hara serious about Personism?

How is O’Hara’s essay or prose poem (Personalism: A Manifesto) a parody?

ELIZABETH BISHOP “In general, I deplore the

‘confessional.’ ”

“But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & father and sex lives and so on.”

“I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972—perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

QHQ Bishop1. What is Elizabeth Bishop’s point?

2. Is it considered unacceptable to incorporate and alter aspects of one’s life into a work of fiction or poetry, as Robert Lowell did in Dolphin?

A. R. AMMONS “How does a poem

resemble a walk?” “each makes use of

the whole body” “every walk is

unreproducible, as is every poem”

“each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns”

“the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words”

QHQ Ammons

AUDRE LORDE “Poetry is the way we help

give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to discipline (transpose) them into language that catches those feelings so that they can be shared.”

“Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

QHQ Lorde

1. What is a possible interpretation of poetry being a skeleton architecture of our lives?

2. Compare and contrast Lorde’s postmodern manifesto and background to Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto.

Selections from Invisible Man

Prologue1. What does the narrator tell us about himself in the very beginning of the prologue?

2. To what does the narrator attribute his invisibility?

3. Why does the narrator attack a man in the street?

4. What is the name of the company with which the narrator claims to be “having a fight”?

5. What reason does the narrator give for his fight with this company?

6. Whose music does the narrator enjoy?

7. What is described in the first part of the narrator’s fantasy?

8. When the narrator talks to the old woman in his fantasy, what reason does she give for loving her old master?

9. Why does one of the old woman’s sons attack the narrator in the fantasy?

10. What has the narrator done to make his dwelling-place more livable?

The Prologue

What does the reader know about the narrator solely on the basis of the Prologue? Explain both what he reveals about himself explicitly and what inferences can be drawn, justifying your findings as you go along.

Invisible Man 1952By Ralph Ellison

QHQ: Prologue

1. What does Ellison mean by being an “Invisible Man”? And why do people interpret his work as a statement about African Americans?

2. is the man really invisible?

3. Why couldn’t the tall, blonde man see the narrator, or why is the narrator invisible to him?

4. How does being a minority feel like being the equivalent of invisible?

HOMEWORK

Think about “Battle Royale”

Read Allen Ginsberg pp. 490-492

Howl and “A Footnote to Howl” pp. 492-500Post #22: Choose one1. Paraphrase 8-10 lines from

Howl. 2. QHQ HOWLEssay #1 due Friday at noon