class 17

1. We will discuss this
when your father
gets home!
Wow! Will
he last
longer in
that outfit?
Farther versus Further

2. 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

3.  New Teams
 Chair Poet
 Lecture: Postmodernism
o Postmodern Manifestos
 Lecture: Invisible Man
o “Prologue”

5. “the rhythmic, inevitably
narrative, movement
from an overclothed
blindness to a naked
vision”
- Dylan Thomas

6. From modernity to post-modernity
Modern age Post modern age
• production
• Community life
• Social class
• Family
• A belief in continuity and situation
• A role of education
• A one-way media
• Overt social control
• Nationhood
• Science aided progress and finding
the truth
• consumption
• fragmentation (individualism)
• Identity from other sources
• Families (many options)
• Breakage with the past/tradition
• Education for what?
• Duality of media (choice/interchange)
• Covert control (CCTV etc)
• Global
• Science is only one source of
knowledge – plurality of truths now
Structure/security/place/stability
YOU KNEW WHO YOU WERE
Confusion/lack of structure/
incessant choice
YOU CREATE WHO YOU WANT TO BE

7. Key features of post-
modernism
 Truth is relative
 Consumerism is all
 Transformation of the self (‘pick ‘n’ mix’)
 Disillusionment with the idea of progress
 Uncertainty
 Fragmentation of social life
 Incessant choice
 Globalisation
 The impact of ICT on social life

8. 10 points of post-modernism & style
1. Emphasis on the centrality of style, at the expense of substance
2. Recycling past cultures and styles – pastiche
3. Playful use of ‘useless’ decoration
4. Celebration of complexity and contradiction. Mixture of high and low
culture.
5. Sensitivity to the subtleties of image, language and signs
6. Intermixing – different styles – collaging
7. Accepting the collapse of distinction and difference
8. Rejection of monolithic definitions of culture – celebrate pluralism and
diversity
9. Scepticism towards metanarratives and ‘absolutism’
10. Decline of the idea of only one source of meaning –truth.

9. Post-modernism illustrated –
‘reality TV’
Reality TV illustrates the
interchange between the consumer
and the media
They are ‘real people’ who
people can be observed and
scrutinised.
They do not entertain – rather than
exist…they are a mish-mash of cctv
surveillance and gameshow
In the real world they are talentless
nobodys who are treated as stars

10. Post-modernism ilustrated –
Disneyland
Disneyland is a simulacra. It is
a simulated reality.
It is artificial – yet ‘real’
It is a place that exists and is
accepted because our
imagination makes it so.
The fine line between reality
and fantasy is‘greyer’
The power of the symbol over
substance.

11. Religion in a post-modern age
 Faith could re-emerge as scientific thinking loses significance
 Religious symbols have new life in new contexts
 Faith is now ‘up for grabs’ in the absence of absolute truth
 People can blend elements of various faiths to suit their lifestyle
 Globalisation has divorced faiths from locations and cultures
 Fundamentalism is a response to a moral vacuum
 People can make choices which are more personal and meaningful
 Collective worship no longer needs to be based on ‘face to face’
interaction

12. Postmodern art

13. Postmodern
sculpture

14. Postmodern
photography

16.  “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

17. QHQ: Sukenick
1. Q: What does Sukenick mean by the quote “fiction is the most fluid and
changing of literary forms, the one that most immediately reflects the
changes in our collection consciousness, and in fact that is one of its great
virtues” (402) in his manifesto?
2. Q: Has the novel evolved since the Modernist period or has it remained
stagnant due to the public’s need for cheap entertainment?
3. Q: What is Suknenick trying to say about people’s perspective toward
literary works when he states, “No one takes novels seriously until they
have become movies, which is to say that no one take novels seriously”.
4. Q: Why is Sukenick so much against realism?
5. Q: How does Sukenick’s Postmodern approach to the concept of innovative
writing attempt to resolve the crisis of modernity that Modernist writers
faced?

18. “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).

19. QHQ: Thompson
1. Q: As a journalist, Thompson ignores tradition by focusing on describing
the people’s reactions rather than the events themselves. How does
Thompson’s writing style branch into the philosophical outlook of
solipsism?
2. Q. Why does Thompson frame the narrative from the accounts of
someone who is high out of their minds?
3. Could there really be “Innovative” fiction? Or is all fiction just a
recycling of old ideas into new time periods?
4. Q: How do Ronald Sukenick and Hunter S. Thompson view fiction
differently?

20. Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds
Solipsism is sometimes expressed as the view that "I am the only mind
which exists," or "My mental states are the only mental states." However,
the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might truly come to believe in
either of these propositions without thereby being a solipsist. Solipsism is
therefore more properly regarded as the doctrine that, in principle,
"existence" means for me my existence and that of my mental states.
Existence is everything that I experience -- physical objects, other people,
events and processes -- anything that would commonly be regarded as a
constituent of the space and time in which I coexist with others and is
necessarily construed by me as part of the content of my consciousness.
For the solipsist, it is not merely the case that he believes that his thoughts,
experiences, and emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only
thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no
meaning to the supposition that there could be thoughts, experiences, and
emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist understands the
word "pain," for example, to mean "my pain." He cannot accordingly
conceive how this word is to be applied in any sense other than this
exclusively egocentric one. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

21. William H. Gass
Gass– 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.”

22. QHQ: Gass
1. Q: How does Glass confirm his idea that “The purpose of a literary
work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in
you, of an imagined sensibility…”?
2. Gass states “if I describe my peach too perfectly, it’s the poem which
will make my mouth water. . . while the real peach spoils”(406). What
does Gass mean by this ?
3. Q: Why does Gass choose to end his manifesto with the line, “Are you
Afraid?” Does this tie into the idea of not being overly specific in works
of fiction?

23. “(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

24. 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?

25. 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.”

26. QHQ O’Hara
1. Q: How is “personism” different from
“postmodernism?
2. O’Hara seems sarcastic in a way about his ‘creation of
personism’. Is O’Hara serious about Personism?
3. How is O’Hara’s essay or prose poem (Personalism: A
Manifesto) a parody?

27. 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.”

28. QHQ Bishop
1. Q: In considering Elizabeth Bishop’s “From Letter to Robert
Lowell”, do you think it is okay to mix both fact and fiction
in your work? Does this cross or line or break the trust of
those around you?

29. 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”

30. QHQ Ammons
1. Q: What does Ammons means when he
compares a poem to a walk?
2. Q: Could Ammons have used anything else to
compare the poem to?

31. 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.”

32. QHQ Lorde
1. Q: Why does Audre Lorde view poetry as such
a powerful tool for women?
2. Q: How does Lorde’s Manifesto serve to
highlight Mary Klages’ idea that
postmodernism was attractive to feminists?

33. Selections from Invisible
Man

34. Prologue
1. 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?

35. 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 1952
By Ralph Ellison

36. QHQ: Prologue
1. Q: What does the quote “light confirms my reality,
gives birth to my form” (210) tell us about the invisible
man?
1. Q: Why does “light” play such an important factor to
the Invisible Man?

37. HOMEWORK
 Think about “Battle
Royale”
 Read Allen Ginsberg pp.
490-492
 Howl and “A Footnote to
Howl” pp. 492-500
 Post #22: Choose one
1. Paraphrase 8-10 lines from
Howl.
2. QHQ HOWL