American Studies
Camelia Elias
What is postmodernism?
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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
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
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
Uses of the term "postmodern"
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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)
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)
change of dominant
 Epistemology  knowledge
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‘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
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‘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)
method vs. foundation
 imitate – in pre-modernism
 make it new – in modernism
 make it ‘funny’ – in postmodernism
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)
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
Donald Barthelme: The Balloon
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7.
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".
How is meaning constructed in this text? On how many
levels can we find the author's engagement with
meaning and signification?
To what extent does this story offer a critique of grand
narratives? Give examples of some instances.
How many contexts can this story be said to engage
with? Are these contexts interrelated?
Comment on the significance of the balloon. Is the
balloon symbolically, metaphorically, or literally referred
to?
Can you relate the text to the notion of simulacra?
How much did you laugh, what did you laugh at, and
why?
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.
general themes
 books portray a vast social network made
up of the industrial, military, masscommunication, 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.
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.
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?
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."
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
The Crying of Lot 49
Themes
 Legacy
 Conspiracy/Paranoia
 Roles/functions
 Escape from/creation of (world)
 Self-realization/narcissism/solipsism
 Reality?
thematics
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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
contexts
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Popular culture/media
Intertextuality (Rapunzel/Remedios Varo)
America in the 1960s
Post-modernism
Experimental realism?
Bordando el Manto Terrestre
(Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle)
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.
Civil Liberties
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The First Amendment
 Freedom of Religion
 Freedom of Speech
 Freedom of the Press
The Civil Rights Movement
1955 – Bus Boycott in Montgomery, AL
1957 – Little Rock, AK Desegregation
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.
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
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.
Martin Luther King (1929-1968)
1963 – March in
Birmingham, AL led
by MLK, Jr.
1963 – March on
Washington, DC.
I have a dream
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."
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.”
Progressive Narrative
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Southern
Baptist
Multiracial and assimilationist
Non-violent
Media centered
Student organized
NAACP as legal representative
Redemptive Narrative
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Northern
Separatist
Africa as source of inspiration
Slavery as ongoing
Community based
Confrontational
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
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
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)
Four propositions…
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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
linear and orderly narration is no longer possible
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Positions and Orientations
 Autobiography is fiction that looks forward to its own
future
 MULTITUDES
 being virtual
Double or Nothing (1998)
Narrative levels
 Protagonist
 Narrator
 Recorder
 “fourth person” (i.e. the author)
 fifth person (real author)
 sixth person (reader)
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
themes
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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”
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
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”
layout
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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
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
multiculturalism
 began to be equivalent to diversity theory
and provided a framework for the
examination of group membership and
power relationships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Andrei Codrescu (1946)
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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 journal
 MacCurdy Distinguished
Professor of English at
Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge.
 Codrescu’s website
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”.
dualisms
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sacred/profane
birth/rebirth
forgetting/remembering
backwards vision/forward vision
nostalgia/creative imagination
 abandonment/abundance
 knowledge/information
 translation/transmission
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
Simic and the American poets
 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"
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