Transcript Contemporary literature

Chapters in British Literature
and Culture
Postmodernism
Enlightenment and its antecedents
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
scientific methodology: empirical methods
instead of speculation
(induction, applied science, empiricism)
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882
The Origin of Species (1859)
man as a part of the biological universe
Friedrich Nietzsche,
1844-1900
•Universe is
structureless and
irrational
• ‘God is dead’
Henri Bergson, 1859-1941
•Time and Free Will
•Consciousness: a
flow of
memories
Sigmund Freud,
1856-1939
The Unconscious
(The Interpretation of
Dreams, 1900)
The split self:
•Ego
•Id
•Superego
• modernism (early 20th c.): breaks with
artistic traditions and conventions,
experimentation
• with time the experiment becomes
conventional
• No clear barrier between modernism and
post-modernism
(cultural history: palimpsest)
Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
• Modernism
Form (closed)
Purpose
Design
Hierarchy
Finished Art Object
Distance
Totalization
Depth
Determinacy
Postmodernism
Anti-form (open)
Play
Chance
Anarchy
Process/Performance
Participation
Deconstruction
Surface
Indeterminacy
Postmodernism
• vague and fashionable term
• meaning and value: disputed
no (little) perspective (How to define our own age?)
• poststructuralism and deconstruction
”meaning is neither inherent in language, nor in the world
of things but is ‘constructed’ by conventional frameworks
of thought and language” (Gray, 1992)
• individuality, human character, freedom:
constructs of a particular culture and time
(vs. universal truths, absolute authenticity
relativised)
• Most often reproduced image
Man no longer the centre of the universe
– no centre
Pale blue dot
Rhizome
• Structure, sign and play (Jacques Derrida, 1966)
”even today the notion of a structure lacking any
center represents the unthinkable itself.”
Centerless system (Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995)
Postmodern
• Centerless system
• Threats of extinction of humanity
(nuclear holocaust, despoiling the
environment/planet, overpopulation)
breaking up of traditional communities
=> sense of despair and disillusionment
(vs. 60s)
• result of meaninglessness: play with styles
and values
• a sense of disjunction or deliberate
confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a
kind of cool detachment
• A postmodern insistence on process rather
than product: a “postmodern” cultural
artifact is one that consistently questions
itself and the context that it seems to fit
within.
.
•
Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD
THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
(1979)
Discourse of science as
opposed to narrative discourse
Grand narratives
“incredulity toward
metanarrative”
• Postmodernism […] leaves us without direction.
The postmodern artwork foregrounds the
complexity of our epoch, thereby remaining an
elitist diversion for a leisure class of
overeducated white folks who “get the joke.”
Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox. Lanham
and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012, 145
popularity? entertaining capacity?
these may overlap: cf. Opening Ceremony of
London Olympic Games
Fiction and reality
”We are all in flight from the real reality.”
Modernist fiction – epistemological uncertainties:
How do we know?
Postmodernist fiction –
ontological uncertainties:
Which is the real world?
Historical fiction: Real compared to what?
language: not a passive reflection (imitation) of the world,
but active modelling.
History (and also nature) is conveyed as it is organized in
accordance with cultural conventions.
• postmodern texts
look at themselves as texts (Ø illusion, isolated
from author and extratextual reality)
often reveal the instability of language
meanings are constructions
ontological uncertainty: which is the real world?
• freedom of interpretation (limitless?)
• Postmodernism, celebrates the freedom of
possibility, but it also seems to make agency or
concrete decision impossible.
• How far is it relevant in the 21st century?
post-postmodernism?
re-evaluation of traditional values and
communities (religion, nation)
• Alan Kirby: Digimodernism
1990s: decomposing postmodernism
(hybrid)
21st c. new cultural paradigm
PoMo obsolete (once fresh), creative period
over
Return of the grand narrative
• aftershock of 1960s radicalism, intellectual
millenarism (all post-s / the past is dead)
• PM: rhetoric of disruption (everything has to
be new, break in human experience)
heroic age of theory
• Incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard)
progress, enlightenment, Christianity
• Habermas: modernity continued all through
PM as an unfinished project
• now PM (used to be fresh) is obsolete
2000 aftermath of PM’S creative period
• 2000: West forced to reflect on the
foundations of its own civilization
„seek to make sense of the grand
narratives”
Return of modernism?
• http://www.stuckism.com/ 1999
• new paradigm: remodernism
• manifesto: ”Modernism has progressively
lost its way, until finally toppling into the
bottomless pit of Post Modern balderdash”
PM’s failure to answer or address any
important issues of being a human being
Hypermodernity / Supermodernity?
• Gilles Lipovetsky Hypermodernity (2004)
social and historical: ethos of consumerism
(hyperconsumption)
modernity speaks of limitless individualism, freedom
from social obligations, emancipation from oppressive
duties, the pursuit of pleasure and personal autonomy
in HM all these become concrete experience
premodern structuring principles (family, church)
stripped from HM world (?)
no rhetoric of ends and posts (not millenarian), not
countercultural, not nihilistic (human rights, love,
others’ well-being)
• Charles Jencks: critical modernism:
dialectic between modernism and its
criticism, modernism2
• Linda Hutcheon: values (modernism: trad.
values not accepted, lack, pomo: values no
longer seeked for)
• F Jameson: PM comes in the 1950s with
the institutionalization of modernism – by
2000 PM also has its canon
institutionalized and dead
Computerization of text
• > new form of textuality
• evanescence and anonymous, social and
multiple authorship (Wikipedia)
triggered by the redefinition of textuality
and culture by the spread of digitalization
• reality TV, Web2.0, videogames, radio
shows: reader/viewer intervenes
• Barthes „From Work to Text”:
”the text is experienced only in an activity
of production”
(as music traditionally)
Reading is linear, but: clicking your way
around the internet: adjacency without
necessarily a logics, rather a history
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Cildren (1981)
‘But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into
the world of linear narrative, the universe of whathappened-next:
”At this rate” – Padma complains – ”you’ll be two
hundred years old before you manage to tell about your
birth.”
• pressures of ‘what-happened-nextism’
• ‘Padma has started getting irritated whenever my
narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an
incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the
strings.’ (cf. Fowles)
A. Kirby: Digimodernism
• prestige of publishing goes down; internet
includes all; greater stratification and
hierarchy will be needed
vast expansion in the activity of reading, yet
”decline in qualitative reading as they
become ever less capable of engaging
mentally with complex and sophisticated
thought expressed in written form”
• text (sms) exists in the act of creation;
lowest form of recorded communication
• Youtube etc: user or author?
„viewser” – engagement with TV
• democratic? Democracy presupposes
education
• PM: objectivity does not exist, truth is
social construct
Facebook e-friendship between accounts
(well designed, so the e-textualization often
invisible)
for many: indistinguishable from actual
friendship
Digimodernist Culture
• modernism: cinema; PM: tv;
DM: videogame
supersubjectivity: you play through your
gaming self/selves (self-identification
neccessary)
• digimodernist textuality (live, right-now):
dm endlessness _> inconclusiveness