Course 1 – 28.09.

2021

-primary texts + critical bibliograph

INTRODUCTION

Course 2 & 3 – 05.10.2021 & 12.10.2021– Modernism vs Realism

Modernism – experimentation, resisting cultural mainstream
Realism – a depiction of reality as it is (Modernism is going to question this statement)
Modernist text is characterized by skepticism, interrogative style, fragmentariness, subjectivity,
requires reader’s participation in filling the gaps
-focus on the city life, on the speed of movement and multiplicity of perception, stylistic
innovations, mimetic attitude towards writing, systematic attempts to multiply the modes of
representations, championing or fear of technology
Modernism – make it new; everything that has to do with Modernism must be new
Modernus = pertaining to the present
1910-1940 – Modernism is the dominant literary current

Course 4 – 19.10.2021
LITERARY IMPRESSIONISM
-a set of strategies designed to heighten our sense of individual perceptual experience
-breaks the conventions of classical realist narrative
Lord Jim – from chapter 4 forward – we get as much as Marlow gets from the story
-strange book
-craving of the exotic which is a textual, novelistic surface that gets gradually more complicated
-the narrator starts on a quest
-the adventures play out in an exotic setting (Indonesia somewhere)
-all our expectations about the book change by chapter 5
-all the ingredients to be a political novel
-contiuous failure of the state to protect the colonials members
-corruption
-the political crises

Preface to The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James

-a house can have as many windows as one wants
Characteristics of H.James, Ford and Conrad
-temporal shifts, disrupted continuity
-multiple points of view
-emphasis on the visual imagination
-forever hesitant and indeterminant

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

-in the present moment, Jim is employed as a water-clerk
-in the past he left home and went on the ship named Patna
- in the future when he leaves the seaside and ventures into the Malay Forest
-an unknown narrator until chapter 4 who seems to have an omnipotent view upon Jim and offers
a hint about his future transformation into Lord Jim
-the story begins in the middle of the two major scenes of the story
-bildungsroman
-Marlow is a spectator he claims to pity Jim in a way, and to feel an urge to protect him. Marlow
is the consummate storyteller, as we see in the hypothetical setup at the end of Chapter 4 and the
beginning of Chapter 5. He reorders the material at hand to maximize suspense and create
meaningful juxtapositions and omissions.
- Marlow's encounter with the alcoholic crewman from the Patna. This is a novel filled with
coincidences and parallel structures, and this is a plot device that will recur. Coincidence is an
important idea in this novel. 

Course 5 – 26.10.2021
Virginia Woolf
-high modernism
-summation of the modernist aesthetic
Fear of the Natzi ocupation – pushed to suicide
-experimental with everything that literature is
-both writer and critique
-the need to find meaning through form in the imminently non-finite – experience itself and
conscience itself
-multiperspectives both in To the lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway: a constellation of experiences
and points of view which are brought together in the novel, redefining subjectivity
-redefining subjectivity
“On or about December 1910, human character changed”
-surprising statement – an aesthetic turn
-post-impressionists’ exhibitions in London Galleries – people were able to see the latest great
changes, the great revolution of vision, the great masters were dead by that time
-the need to change – the clock to be reset
-post impressionism – the need to find the meaning of form, the imminently non-finite
Year 1910 – war, the moment of change

 Impressionism manifesto – “Modern Fiction” 1919

 Programmatic way (manifesto) by Woolf that suggested the stepping on stage of a
new generation of writers different from the Victorian writers
 The necessity to find the aesthetic formula to capture the working of the mind, the
experience and the consciousness
 Attempt at memoir “the catch of the past”, as she named it – she kept a journal
 She emphasizes the idea that the mind is at any time full of impressions coming
from all sides
 “what can we do with the reality of the consciousness?” (the reality happening
right now, of the experience)
 Impressionism: “moments of being”
 Life writing and memoir – the dominant literary form of the 19 th century – Woolf
is against the tradition, she kept a diary
 The struggle to put in writing these moments of being
 The necessity of an authentic form of writing which can now battle these
moments, moments of intensity
 The need of writing to achieve the immediacy that only the experience in the
present moment can achieve

 Realism/Impressionism/Modernism
 “I make it real by putting it into words” – the writing that narrates vs the writing
that creates something – it projects reality
 She insists on wholeness, on these sense of real
 “cotton wool” – the moments of non-being
 She doesn’t believe in the transcendent power – everything is immanent, the idea
of authorship is not taken into consideration
 The conviction that the aesthetic form can render and create that pattern in the
artwork to achieve wholeness

 Impressionism: mediation between absent past and incomprehensible present

 Literary past
 Insistence on the individual
 Surface vs depth
 Meaning is distributed through reflection

 Mrs. Dalloway
 Foregrounding the nature of sign making and meaning making
 “KEY”- metaphor of the dramatization of the act of reading and writing –
dramatization of meaning-making itself and of act of reading, the way we assign
meaning to the visual signs

 Impressionism
 Form of writing to do justice to the 1st person writing experience
 The epistemological consideration of knowing how far can we know and how can
we come into contact with the consciousness
 The interest shifts from the exterior to the adventures happening in the mind –
reflector characters by which we follow the way they come to experience and
reflect the consideration of events
 Anti-mimetic – writing that uses a more authentic form for doing justice to the
experience – becomes a linguistic artifact itself
 Qualia – 1st person, uniquely individual experience of a sensation, authentic form
of experience

 Mr. Bennnett and Mrs. Brown

  Focuses on a singular character trying to emancipate her from the clutter to which
she is subject

 Henri Bergson and William James – philosophers

 Woolf employs methods from philosophy

 Impressionism and the “inward turn”

 Tropes for rendering consciousness/experience:
“Stream of consciousness” – fluid (William James)
“mind – wandering” – multi-directionality of consciousness (W.J)
“halo or penumbra” – way present in the works of Woolf (critical ones)

 Henri Bergson – temps vs duree

 Temps – the measurable time
 Duree – duration – the temporability of experience, there is no gap between
present and past
 Snowball - stream of consciousness
 Preocupaion with temporality in the mind
 Stream of consciousness in Woolf’s writing – the writing of interiority/ the texts
are in the 3rd person – neither inside, nor outside: integrate technique, allows
writing shift between different characters, mobile minds
Stream of consciousness is NOT present in Mrs. Dalloway, because the text is in 3rd person,
instable territory, neither inside nor outside

To the Lighthouse
 A spectral elegy to places which felt to be lost and to her parents
 Leslie Stephen – scholar on the Victorian scene
 Julia Stephen – scholar as well
 1905 – in a diary a place turned ghostly, a sense of estrangement, a place which
has become inaccessible to the children
 No form of transmission in interaction – experiencing of consciousness from the
inside

 Absence and presence

 At the heart of the novel: bringing the past into the present, the impossible
moment between absence and presence
 Image of a kitchen table - divorced of its use
 A kitchen table – an image for the whole attempt of making something present
that is not there, perceptual reality, to imagine the impossible, the thing
unwitnessed
 Diary III, 36’/ “Letter to Roger Fry”
-control absence – the absence of the past event/rememorated by the
painting
-making the absence of Mrs. Ramsay present in the painting
 -suggestion of symbolism – break of unity incorporated in the form of
fiction which prospects unity
-refusing any kind of symbolism – the lighthouse is not a symbol, it is the
central line added to the painting ten years later
-Painting – the impact of one moment seen 10 years ago + rendering the
impression of a particular consciousness
-to create a pattern of smth. that is no longer here

 Self-referentiality
 the fact that the painting is trying to complete the painting – reflection of the
process of writing itself
 Woolf’s dilemma when writing (past vs. present)
 4 aesthetic exigencies of finding a pattern:
-the act of creating the vision on the canvas + triggering it in the spectator
-the insistence of finding a form that could cast meaning and organize
words into a pattern
Passages that dramatize the act of writing itself

 Vision
 One central point of view is dissolute
 Insistence on sight
 The use of the trope of seeing that acts as unifying experience
 Textual fluid – the identity of the figures – the sense of self moves between the
singular and the repeatable
 Looking is a unifying experience or a collective experience, it is a metaphor for
point of view, for consciousness

 Identity/ subject formation

 Reflection in which Woolf speaks about what we subject to an influence – the
consciousness of the others on ourselves
 The self being influenced by the others – the infringement of the consciousness of
the others on the consciousness of oneself
 Interested in the social atmosphere in the interpersonal relationships

 Mrs. Ramsay
 Trying to turn the painting into writing – the sense of self when she is not
interacting with anyone
 The text speaks of the core of darkness – not translated into anything external
 The moments when she becomes completely oblivious, she became the thing she
looked at
 The challenge of Woolf’s works – to show the singularity of self, the moment
when the self is completely empty
 The core of darkness
 Mr. Ramsay
 Stands for the ideal 19th century mind – mind that is derived into categories,
classifications, the perfectly taxonomical mind that is derived into categories

 Voice of Woolf – who is speaking, who is the narrator?

 Multi-personal narration, from experience to experience (conglomerated
community)
 Voice without a self, a narrative voiceover which is not anchored in any of the
characters we see in the novel
 Free indirect style of discourse – unique reflexive narrative technique, almost
fluid
 Feminine language that goes through the narration and defines the rules of syntax
 Ecriture feminine – has nothing to do with the gender of the author (James Joyce
uses it too)

 Time passes
 Provocative element – the interlude
 Windows and lighthouse – attempt in the same style to narrate the passage of time
unwitnessed when all the human events are pushed in the background and only
the tiny changes are registered
 Who is speaking? The time itself maybe
Modernismquestions institutions – government, church, anti-enlightenment rejecting
certainties, anti-romantic=no great belief in nature, fragmentation, perspective of the
house
Mrs. Ramsay=x independence, conventional gender role
Mr=metaphysical professor, philosopher
Lily x marriage, wants to paint: finishing painting of James and Mrs.Ramsay
She describes it as ‘two blocks and a corridor’, corridor=middle section
3rd person, free indirect speech, the narrator is the house
Stream of consciousness? Intense emotions
Fragmentation=switch from head to head
Immortality through art:Mrs Ramsay

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

-capturing the nowness, the present moment
-intensity of now and of the beauty that is everywhere around

 Narrative techniques
 Perspectives change, one moment we are inside her head, another moment
we are outside of it – free indirect speech/discourse, dramatizing aesthetic
demands
 The perfect control the narrator has over the narrative perspective
 The capturing of Nowness
 ”the ebb and flow of things”.

 The question of Identity

 Social masques

 Clarissa vs. Septimus

 Sanity and insanity
 Septimus – his death was a kind of catharsis; not really a tragedy
 He is not a tragic hero, there is no hybris, nothing excessive
 If the possibility of choice is corrupted – it is a tragedy
 Whether or not he was a hero, is a subjective matter
 Attitude towards Death
 Ambivalent view towards death
 Clarissa is afraid of death
 Septimus doesn’t fear death but at the end he doesn’t want to die
 Intimations of mortality
 Septimus finds his kind of death a pretty melodramatic way of dying
 Communication
 Unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings properly

 Irony and Satiric Passages

 Can the novel be read as a social satire?

-Clarissa as Othello – the murderer of her own happiness by choosing conformity

-the story of Othello – Othello is the tragic hero
-the presence of mortality enhances the sense of being alive – heightened awareness of being
alive
-the feminism of Woolf’s writing reflected in this novel – a form which can escape a logical
discourse
-the syntax is made elastic
-ecriture feminine has nothing to do with the author’s sex
-it is present in James Joyce’s novels as well, although he was a male

Course 6 – 02.11.2021
ANTIMODERN MODERNISM + The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
-an increasing sense of unease due to the evolution of technology – dehumanization of man
-anti-modernism is an undercurrent of modernism
-they thought they were repairing the destruction of technology
 The project of cultural regeneration
 Reparative “countermovement” within Modernism to modernist “destroyers”
(T.J.Clark)
 Paradoxical movement within Modernism – recapturing of a pre-modern,
“primitive” sense of nature/self/body in an attempt to counter the damaging
effects of modernity
 Nostalgic of reaching back – primitive
 T.S.Elliot, Virginia Woolf etc speak in mannierism
 D.H. Lawrence profoundly resented this preoccupation with the life of
consciousness which tended to be disconnected from the body
 D.H. Lawrence - the advocacy with the “aristocracy of the spirit”
-coal mining changed the scenery
-industrial England instead of organic England
-large scale industrial waste

 Organicism, vitalism, ecological thought

 D.H.Lawrence works with rhythmic repetition as a way of emphasizing the
corruption “so pure that it’s hard and brittle”
 The text registers the ugliness and the hideous in the landscape
 The expression of corruption; human presence and modern life is a form of
corruption of the ecosystem
 The angularity of the houses suggests this corruption that is “so pure that it’s hard
and brittle”
 The old church tower presented in a hideous manner, daunting image
 Human intrusion in the landscape – this is the corruption

The Rainbow
 About the plot:
 Set in a period of increasing industrialization
 Tom Brangwen, a rural farmer whose storyline is initially centered around his
marriage to Polish refugee Lydia. Tom is the epitome of the old rural way of life,
coming from a long line of small landowners living in Marsh Farm in
Nottinghamshire.
 Lidia is at the beginning his housekeeper, than his wife
 Tom is able to connect more with his stepdaughter Anna who has grown up in
England than Lydia.
 Anna is characterized a fiery girl from a young age, and the bulk of this second
narrative follows her as a young adult and her tempestuous relationship and
marriage with Will Brangwen (brother to Tom)
  Anna wishes to engage with the actual world, while Will wants Anna’s undivided
romantic love.
 Ursula becomes the final bridge into the Lawrence's final section, acting as the
iconic figure of the novel and embodying the themes of the latter stage of the
novel
 Ursula is nonconformist, she doesn’t rush into marriage and even declines the
proposal from her long-time boyfriend which leads in losing him despite the fact
that she eventually changes her mind. She engages in multiple relationships even
with a same sex person.
 She finds out that she is pregnant right after she lost Anton Skrebensky, her
boyfriend
 It is here that the novel links back to its very title as Ursula spots a rainbow and
sees it as a symbol for a new age of human civilization - rising above material
concerns, both the old and the new kind of industrial corruption, and looking
onwards to the a hopeful future of “Truth”.

-the image of the rainbow at the end of the novel – it is certainly not religious in nature
-conventionally, the emblem of the rainbow is an image of promise, of connection, a hope for a
better future
-it has to do with something that is organically rooted in the body
-utopia of bodily rebirth

 Against modernist self-consciousness: towards an anthropological turn

 essay Why the Novel Matters – contradicts the old compartmentalization of body
parts
 the brain is not the centre anymore
 thought is an organic process, a revolution of the body itself

 “A new relationship between ourselves and the universe means a new morality”
 An understanding of the body as being permanently in the creative flux (“Art and
Morality”, 1923)

 Myth, vitalism, organicism

 “the blood-consciusness” (D.H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russel)
 The use of myth in Modernism – as a kind of projection to create meanings of its
own rather that something identified in narrative structure
 The novel does something interesting – Ursula breaks up with Skrebensly There is
a suggestion of an abortion; she is coming from a long period of illness which
might be her body’s response to the abortion

 The paradoxes of anti-modern Modernism

 Didacticism
 Call for anti-modern novelistic form – the “real” novels
  Urge to return to organic, preindustrial social organization
 Ecological, anti-capitalist antimodernism

Antimodernist=conservative

-chronological

Brangwen family:Tom and Lydia=he marries a widow with a child

Anna and Will=naïve love, they have ursula

Ursula and Anton Skrebensky – sexual, she engages in lesbian relationships

Ursula tries to escape the horses and falls, leading to a miscarriage, getting up she sees the
rainbow filling her with hope ‘the world built up in a living fabric of Truth’

Deeply flawed relationships => Lawrence critiques the institution of marriage, people should
abandon it and follow their instincts

Women in love-ursula main character, sequel

Course 7 & 8 – 09.11.2021 & 16.11.2021

James Joyce and Ulysses

 “The revolution of the word” (self-)parody, pastiche, intertextuality, allusion, self-
generating textuality
 Elitism vs popular culture
 Exile – Europeanism (Trieste. Zurich, Paris)
 Periphery – Irishness – Dublin
 Protest against the Catholic church, a power which he sees shuttering the country (social
scandal – he lived with a woman whom he did not marry, which was unacceptable)

“His writing is not about something: it is that something itself” (Samuel Beckett)

Dedalus – symbolical name – Daedalus was the father of Icarus

Free indirect discourse and authorial irony

Impersonality

-Ulysses is the most experimental novel of the modernism, he changed the language in a way
nobody else did since Shakespeare
In A portrait… Stephen Dedalus as Icarus, “I shall try to fly by those nets”, the sun, hybris, the
text speaks of this heroic flight; free indirect discourse (3rd person but maintaining some elements
of a first-person narrator, shows the private emotions of the characters, remaining an observer)

-he chose Dublin because in his acceptance it is “the center of paralysis”

-Modernist Ulysses – mobile consciousness (free-indirect discourse, direct interior monologue,

stream-of-consciousness)

-parallax of consciousness – multiplication of versions reinforces stability of world outside

consciousness, while exposing similarities/differences between different minds, it is destabilizing

-simultaneism, collage, cinematic montage

-Joyce uses deconstruction

-excess, (self) parody, pastiche

Stream of consciousness – one thought interrupts the other, a kind of non-syntactic, continuous,
fluid outpour of language, when mind goes in different directions simultaneously

 Ulysses
 About the plot
 The story begins at 8 am, 16th June 1904
 Leopold Bloom is the protagonist middle-aged Jew whose job as an advertisement
canvasser forces him to travel throughout the city on a daily basis., he is the Ulysses
of the story
 the younger hero of the novel is Stephen Dedalus, his development is shown
throughout the novel, although the focus is on Bloom

-the story happens during a day

-flickers of thought, things explained that actually happened in a matter of seconds, a subjective
camera and then a camera which shows the character from the outside, objectively

-as readers we learn to read the flicker

-Bloom is dressed in black, he is going to a funeral

-it is a warm and sunny day, uncharacteristically for Dublin

-he is dressed in black and the light accumulates on him?

-image of the Orient – geographic journey

-stream of consciousness technique

-various styles/discourses

-narrative techniques: mobile consciousness (free indirect discourse, monologue, stream of

consciousness)

-parallax of consciousness – multiplication of versions reinforces stability of world outside

consciousness, while exposing similarities/differences between different minds

-Ulysses transforms itself throughout a novel, it is Joyce’s program

-the revolution of the word in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

A Portrait of the artist…

-no stream of consciousness since 3rd pers narrator

-ecriture feminine,

Course 9 – 23.11.2021

George Orwell
- “the key-note of the post-war writers would be the ‘tragic sense of life’ “

At-swim-two-birds

Modernist mimesis

Modernist self-reflectiveness

Postmodern self-reflexiveness

Postmodernism
-it is hybrid, amalgamated, elements taken from here and there
-it is past classical ideologies

-it has to do with transforming history into spectacle

- it is overly inclusive – turn the inclusiveness against postmodern

-the artwork itself is not an object, but an ambient

-the curators of Nordic Pavillons, Biennale di Venezia are also the artists

-minimalist high design

-metanarratives – metaphysical, philosophical narratives

After Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 1987

-presents a vision over postmodern

-alternatives – stories of the postmodern/postmodernism

- To URBANISM – the city of the Global Village – City as Cosmos (sci-fi); world breaks up into
untermed blocks, nations, tribes, sects etc. new diversity or new world unification/world
totalitarianism

Partial recovery of nature: ecological activism, urban renewal, green revolution, health foods etc.

- To Technologism – runaway technology: from genetic engineering and thought control to the
conquest of space. Futurists and Technophiles vs Arcadians and Luddites

Boundless dispersal by media: sensuous object becoming anxious, the de-defined

Computer as substitute or extension of consciousness? Will it increase reliance on prior orders,

or will it help create novel forms? (e-novels, blog-novels)

Alternatives to “Dehumanization”

-anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism

-acceptance

-irony radicalized

Alternatives to Primitivism

-away from mythic, towards the existential, beat and hip, energy, spontaneity

-later: post-existential, ethos, psychedelics, madness, animism, magic

-hippie movement, rock music and poetry, pop

Alternatives to Antinomianism

-the counter cultures, free speech movement, church militants, lgbt, queer, self-representation

-counter western ways or methaphysics, zen, buddhism, Hinduism, western mysticism,

transcendentalism, the occult

Alternatives to Experimentalism

Courses
Postmodernism 1

Charles Jencks, Critical Modernism: „America is modern, Europe is post-modern, the Ford
Motor Company was modern, Amazon is post-modern” „Minimalism is modern, Picasso was
both”
Postmodern is everything that is hybrid and it is past classical political ideologies and 3. It has a
lot to do with transforming
-prejudice aganist modern

Linda Hutcheon
– focuses on poetics of postmodernism, one who did the most to theorise the postmodernism
-in the last 10-15 years – institutiolastion of the postmodernism
-postmodernism turned into academic discourse
-„interest in the hybrid”
-„the very inclusivity became the mark of its very complicitous critique”

David Harvey questions in which political paradigm does postmodernism lie

Possibilities: a revolution, by its opposition to all forms of meta-narratives (marxism,
freudianism) and close attention to marginalisation, they receive a voice (women, gays, blacks)
=> emancipation
Another possibility: ‘comercialization and domestication of modernism’, ‘anything goes’ – view
similar to Charles Jencks
-Harvey treats it as a complex phenomenon
‘acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity’ (unlike modernism), it doesn’t try
to create order
-accepts the finitude which is the condition of the artwork

Postmodern art: ‘The Collectors’, Elmgreen & Dragset

The image is not an object, but an ambient
-multiple illusions
-the two artist transformed the whole building
-high design villa, used to be occupied by a couple of arhitectures
Elements in the pictures:
the wrecked table – sign of heartbreak
wrecked stairs – the library becomes inaccesible
the house looked recently lived in
in the pool: looks like somebody who drowned, opened a scene of a movie, the story of a suicide

Statements:
1. Art is not an object, is not something we can locate, it becomes an ambient, the artwork
has been transformed into an emerssive space
2. Not any object is touched by art, the transformation of the artwork not only in a concept,
but sth that happens entirely in the experience of the spectator that lets himself be
emersed, no authority of the creator, everything is a quotation from somewhere:
philosophy, movie scenes, the whole thing is storified, you are encouraged to rewrite the
story of the relationship
Postmodernism – definitions
J-F Lyotard, the first to frame postmodernism, postmodern conition= ‘incredulity towards
metanarratives’, by metanerratives=are explained
‘postmodernism is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’
– two oxymorons– much more aware of the political context, more ethical, more sensitive
form of modernism
-emancipatory and a form of critical thought that has learnt all lessons of totalitarism
-not chronological, he does not see it as the 70-80 gen, but as a culture which could by
distinguished from modernism by being more radical
-transistorical aesthetic, not a limiting historical period
-he works not with the period term, but the radical artworks!

Fr. Jameson
Postmodernism=cultural logic of late capitalism, opposite to Lyotard
-a form of cultural production, total ‘subservience to the market’
-‘relinquishing of utopian, emancipatory project of modernity’, ‘radical eclectism’
-could be translated into a culture of consumption, entertainment
-cinical, subordinated to the market

Gianni Vattimo proposes 2 concepts, associates postmodernism with penisero debole (‘weak
thought’), he frames it in opposition to ‘strong thought’ (pensiero forte)
-analitical attitude, ongoing questioning regarding postmodernism
Pensiero debole=truth may never be accesed
-the accent is more on the critical thinking, constantly evolving

All these framings are related to a whole philosophical, etic trun

Images:
Gucci dans les rues: Liberte, egalite, sexualite, transformation into a spectacle, the slogan
becomes an advertisement which serves the image of the product
Skull portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat on show at Louis Vuitton Museum, Paris; this artist was
the first marginal in every sense, us black ghetto – homosexuality, the aesthetics of street signs,
grafitti, transformed it for the first time in art
Alternative ‘stories’ of the postmodernism, after Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 1987:
-more radical thought
All narratives of Hassan are given as alternatives to modernism practices
to URBANISM:
-the city as global village. City as cosmos (sci-fi)
-reemargence of the regional, glocal, new architecture
-partial recovery of nature: ecological activism, urban renewel, green revolution

Postmodernist alternatives to technologism:

-runaway technology: from genetic engineering and thought control to the conquest of space,
futurists and technophiles vs arcadians and luddities
-physical change of media, one of the results is coming into the artwork – videoart, technology
-dispersal by media, artforms become one again aconcept

Alternatives to ‘dehumanization’
-anti-authoritarianism, far reaching consequences -deconceptualization of the artwork, the accent
falls on participation, it is no longer the authority of the author – emancipation of spectator who
becomes a participant, a co-creator
-radicalizing irony – black humour, comedy of absurd, paradigm of pastriche, slapstick
-procession of simulacra (Baudrillard), theorizing postmodernism as a simulacra

Alternatives to Primitivism:
-away from the mythic, towards the existential.beat and hip, energy, spontaneity (Mailer)
-recuperations of the esoteric (Castaneda)
-mostimportant: Hippie movement

Pieces from Yoko Ono: his pieces can be read as visual arts, as poetry, these are invitations for
the reader

2 examples of postmodern visual art:

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (real chair, photo of it,dictionary entry) – simulacrum,
invited to ponder the very concept of chair
Sigma Polke, Freundinnen – characteristically granular surface, brings back the vibe of
photographs in magazines, western fashion photography

Same Hassan, alternatives to antinomianism:

-the counter cultures: free speech movement, church militants, women’s lib, lgbt, queer, new
disciplines: gender studies. rebellion, resistance

Alternatives to experimentalism:
-modernism=formalist, striving to put a form, with the postmodernism = discontinuity,
indeterminate, improvisational, antiformalism
-fusion of forms
Performance art=concept of postmodernism, the radicalism expands, especially in harsh
ideologies, conflictual policies, confrontational political form of art
-impermanent, unstructured

Antinomies in Hassan book:

Modernism VS PostM
Romanticism/symbolism vs pataphysics/dadaism
Form vs antiform
Purpose vs play
Design vs chance
Creation vs decreation
Distance vs participation
Paraonia vs schizophrenia
Metaphysics vs irony
Determinancy vs indeterminancy
Transcendence vs immanence

Postmodernism 2

3 artworks, late modernism vs postmodernism

Paradigm change in sensibility
Alberto Giacometti, Woman, 45 – classified as existentialist art, the necessity to rethink the
human ethics
George Segal, The Subway, 68 – superficially, both arts show sth similar, in a sense of isolation
of the human beings; in this artwork we have the aura of the artwork intact, the immanent value
of presence – an actual ambient, emmersive, you can walk, sit, reproduces a period,
characteristic seats of the subway, no transcendental presence, no artist, whereas the first is a
singularobject, sth that reflects the authorship
The artwork shifts from an object into an experience
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, 1968 – the gesture of slashing a canvas, he chose it to be a
material which carries the illusion of mimesis, he also draws attention to a play of layers, the
space between the lines – similar to metafictional gestures, they didn’t start with the
postmodernism (existed in don quijote) but became sine quanon in postmodernism

Several chronologies of modernism – postmodern should come into being with some kind of
death of the ideology of modernism
Charles Jencks: death of modernism = ‘implosion of minoru yamasaki’, 1972, they portrayed the
utopy of reshaping cities, emancipatory revolutionary idea, the buildings in time became ghettos
-they were eager to get a date

The many deaths of modernism

Post 1960, Ch. Jencks: operates with historic events, tragic, ecological catastrophies
Tentative brick-holes in a symbolic burial of Modernism:
-Samuel Beckett 1938
-Joyce 1939
Lyotard: La condition postmoderne in 1979

Architectural examples (architecture features postmodernism for the first time)

LESS IS MORE (modernist architecture, minimalism, rigurosity, functionalism, e.g.
VillaSavoye) vs. LESS IS A BORE (Frank Gehry’s house, all kinds of forms,no harmony,no
unity), houses of architects are manifestos

Jencks, Postmodernism (87), the emergent rules (regarding architecture):

1. New hybrid, disharmonious harmony, instead of modernism integration
Paradoxes: asymmetrical symmetry, unfinished whole, dissonant unity
2. Cultural/political pluralism: celebration of difference, alterity, irreducible heterogeneity
3. Urban contextualism: new buildings should fit into, uses a space already given
-nothing is aestheticized
Woolf in the dairy speaks of a pattern that needs to be formed, antithetical to postmodernism

4. Anthropomorphism: incorporation of ornament reminiscent of the human body

5. The historical continuum/relation betw past&present-parody, nostalgia (not written of),
pastiche, anamnesis (suggested recollection)
6. ‘return to painting’// ‘return to content’ – no underlying thread, coherence, mythology,
beyond ‘will to meaning’
7. Double-coding: irony, ambiguity, contradiction
Charles Moore, Piazza d’Italia: doesn’t subject form to function (as in modernism), the
kitsch
-mixing idioms, attitudes from different periods
-you don’t have the other parts, simultaneous validity/invalidity

8. multivalence: multiple sets of references, an inclusive intent

Double coding, Călinescu, Five faces of Modernity:

‘the aesthetic of pm has been described as essentially citationist’ in opposition to’minimalists’
who ‘banned reference as impure’

Back to Jencks:
9. anamnesis as tradition reinterpreted
10. new rhetorical figures: paradox, oxymoron, double-coding
11. return to the absent center: desire to celebrate community

Sigmar Polke artwork, Frau Herbst und ihre zwei Tochter – palimpsest, overlapped images, only
partially controlled element, an image of a woman with her children, right on top of the ghostly
image – no imaginable world that could fit all of these elements

Onthological postmodernism: words that can’t live together, multiplicity

Poststructuralist-inspired theories of pm:
(1)Barthes:’death of the author’
Derrida:’deconstruction’
(2)Foucauldian: the ‘other’ categories – women,people of color, non-hetero, political nuance
(3)Lyotardian: fatal splitting of domains of knowledge: art, science, social
He suggests going back to the philosopher of the enlightenment: Kant, the concept of the sublime
Lyotard and Jencks have very different perspectives of postmodernism
Lyotard radical modernism/postmodernism=sth that can’t be shown
Concludes, using Kant, that radical art can only work with elusion.

Lyotard: modernist vs pm sublime:

Modernist sublime=Proust
Pm sublime=Joyce, sets free the signifier,
Is Joyce the right candidate? Joyce displays preoccupation with form, even if in Ulysses there is
multiplicity, it is rigorously constructed
Samuel Beckett – literature of science (‘Say a body. Where none. No mind’)

Pm at its end-yet-again, or expanding?

Steven Connor – he reminds us that the present of the pm is still here with us ‘there is nothing
absent from this present’, a present grown old, future oriented present, describing well the pm of
today
- he also says that is still hazy, underdefined, contradictory
- it is notover,still metamorphosing, its areas of interest into contemporary ethics;
sexuality; legislation; theology; performance studies

visual art: Anselm Kiefer, The High Priestess: volumes made of lead (heavy metal), madness of
gathering knowledge, the archive has become inaccessible, a powerful visual metaphor of being
separated from the origins of knowledge
another artwork: Doris Salcedo, Tabula Rasa – a close-up of a table, old, used piece of furniture,
every piece is meticulously recomposed, after being shattered, it is done to honor to experience
the victims of trauma, the body of the furniture is shattered and recomposed=the way of showing
the painful process

These 2 artworks=directions regarding ethical questions

An incursion into postmodernist fiction – Graham Swift, Waterland; Salman Rushdie,

Midnight’s Children

-another type of writing

-a form of writing that questions itself
-whose story is told?
-lots of questions regarding the conditions of emersion

Artwork: Musee des Beaux Arts, Lille – J-M Ibos, M. Vitart (92-97)
-reconceptualization of the museum
-it captures a contextualist architecture, not in a gesture of comprehending, but rather creating an
intricate, reflexive structure – incorporating a structure from the past in the present (a shadow of
the old building overlapped over the actual construction), an example of a piece from the past, a
structure of reflection in all senses of the word

Postmodernism=age of space, juxtaposition, asamblage, rather than time; the age of permanent
present
-one particular ingredient of the fiction: transforms the past into a collage, where the past
features as an element freely juxtaposed

 The present becomes a space-dominated age, ‘palimpsest history’ (Brooke-Rose),

M. Foucault: heterogenous space, different spaces: => utopias (imaginary spaces) & heterotopias
(spaces of difference)

Katherine N. Hayles: ‘The cutting loose of time from sequence, and consequently from human
identity, constitutes the third wave of postmodernism, but it no longer functions as a contuum
along which human action can be meaningfully plotted’
-many packages of time that are disconnected, the accent is again on the asamblage, bricolage

‘presentification of the past’, Linda Hutcheon: ‘<<reality>> of the past is discursive reality’, an
interrogation of history, the past is incorporated and modified, giving it a different meaning; pm
acknowledges the urge to create order, while pointing that this order is simply a human construct
Accepting that all is provisional, doesn’t mean stop thinking,it means we never stop thinking (A
Poetics of Postmodernism), ethical urge, as Steven Conor states, pm is not over, it is still
expanding

Hayden White, Metahistory:’historiography as a text is shaped by the same creative process

involved in the writing of fiction’ – different domains, similar meaning, they all work with
narratives (which implies fictionalization)

‘’Historia’ or ‘Inquiry’… To know that what we are is what we are because our past has
determined it.’ (G. Swift, Waterland)

‘Man is the story-telling animal’ (-//-)

-a fiction that brings together fragments of history, personal history, family history,
anthropological history of the ambient where the family comes from;
Waterland=a territory molded by the river
-within this natural history we also have reflections on the discovery of
Anthropocentric and non anthropocentric histories
The teacher of history:’history and its near relative, histrionics’
Close-up on how history is written
Reflection on the narratives that consist our and her stories, a larger sense, flat events
Storytelling is exorcising the emptiness
‘History’ vs histories (natural, local, socio-economic, family), enlarging our sense of continuity,
how the historical context is closely intertwined with human ‘histories’

‘Explaining is a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near them’ – metafictional
reflection on the discourse

The space is shaped and reshaped by water, metaphor for language (‘When you work with water,
you have to know and respect it’ - Waterland)

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

‘I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history’

-connecting an individual to the history of the continent
-both novels play with a template of the novel delivered by the 19th century, classical realism but
also both go back to Tristram Shandy, for example (all digressions, extrapollations)
-birth of India as a nation
-plays with English and Indian, Arabic traditions
-fundational tropes: turning against those traditions; one of the tropes: the defragmentation of the
narrative, the narrator’s grandfather, dr. Aadam Aziz, an europeanised young doctor, never
having acces to the whole image, that is a reworking
Passage about India looks like an asamblage
-self commentary, with the trope he captures his methods of story-telling, which corresponds to
india emerging as a nation
Padma-the role of the ‘sheherezade’
-excessivness of the reality
-the monstrously growing image, the story of Nadir Khan’s roommate, this attempted miniaturist
commits suicide
-episode with lifafa das, recollecting Nadir Khan’s friend: ‘is this an Indian disease, this urge to
encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected to?’
-another trope: the whole novel gravitates around this fictionalised identity
-the novel reflects on the fact that not only space is important, but even time can be a participant,
even time is fragmented, it is not incongruent, different paces in the same space=> wider
reflection on self-representation in the novel => time is unreliable ‘it could even be partitioned:
the clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts’; ‘’It was only a
matter of time’ my father said’
-another main trope: representation of gestation of the future; quote about the belly: ‘What had
been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma’, all is presented in
terms of writing, gestation in the womb of the English literary
Ending: the dead body disintegrates into regions, becoming one with the present reality, India
-a novel of exile, losing oneself in the crowd
-in both texts the trope of gestation expressed in terms of the language
-allegorical

Plot:
-Saleem Sinai is the narrator
-born on 1947, when India gained independence
-saleem is punished by his mother not to speak, this is when he starts hearing voices, the
importance of listening
-Padma=lover who serves the role of the audience
-ALLEGORY
-tellepatic powers, hears the thoughts of the other ‘midnight’s children’
-he is ‘handcuffed to history’
-his body is cracking under ‘too much history’, turning into dust

Course - Ethical turn

-a new phenomenon in arts, philosophy etc

-interrogating both the past and present, with is complicent with the traumatizing past, filling
gaps of memory, exposing traumatising events in past which never quite came to an end
-connected to poetics and politics of memory
-the human consciousness
-writers that work with the interrogation empathy
-darker, blacker humour, instead of pm irony
-best illustrated by Derrida – publishing the animal I am – new discipline – animal studies; this
moment is marked by lots of reading, a whole set of thinkers
-artificial intelligent studies

All these issues tend to gravitate around investigative departures

Beyond (?) postmodernism, the ‘ethical turn’

-new form of questioning the past and present, examples of artworks:

1. Jochen & Esther Gerz, Mahmal gegen Faschismus, 1986 – what it makes it unique is a
complete overholding of what a public monument should be, the act of commemoration;
it portrays the finitude of memory, the ‘monument’ is partially inscribed, and it also
allows people who pass by to paint something, each year they sink into the pavement, one
day they will be completely erased, human/historical memory is finite, we can not be
continuously aware even of such traumatising historical events
2. Anselm Kiefer, Barren Landscape (87-89)
-his paintings are not flat, they appear almost sculptural - palimpsest
-image as a ruin, archeological find
3. William Kentridge, Trionfi e Lamenti, Rome, 2016
-four images, based on the history of Rome
-black parts: the smoke left, works like an ingraving in the narrative, the image is finite,
in time the image will fade

S.Connor: less visible mode of reading: a metamporphosis of the postmodern

R.Eaglestone: pm= a response to the success of western thought – horrified

-radical critique of Heideggerian ontology which ‘affirms the primacy of freedom over
ethics’(Totality&Infinity,Emmanuel Levinas), ‘the other’ should not be objectified
-‘I think’ comes down to ‘I can’ – an exploitation of reality (Totality&Infinity)
- body theories, theories of empaty/affect, trauma studies, animal studies, ecocriticism,
posthumanism
-sheer existence of the other, I am face-to-face with the other

Levinas: ontology grounded in responsibility to(ward) the Other

He theorises ethics as occurrence of ‘strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I’

Essay The Animal that Therefore I Am, by Derrida, draws to Levinas’s ideas
-the author presents himself ashmed that he is seen naked by his cat
George Orwell: the human is the only entity consumes but doesn’t produce anything

Derrida quotes Montaigne ‘When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her
more than she is to me?’ continuous interrogation, who establishes the hierarchy?

The Animal that Therefore I Am, by Derrida – radical language critique

-Derrida really shows the institutionalised thought, systematically biased human thought
-he describes ‘l’animot’
-all non-human creatures are wrongly characterised as animals
-he wonders if ‘thou shalt not kill’ is reffered only to crimes ‘against humanity’

Coetzee, ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Beckett’

-he approaches the cartesian worldview (mind and body, the body is a servant, the mind is a
puppet-master)
-describes experiments in Elisabeth Costello – the chimpanzees, using tools, making
instrumental connections
-the essay places us in the caged creature that is forced to carry out this boring tasks with the nut
-The Beckett setup,chaged creatures, we don’t know why, we don’t know how;
-main idea: the creature does not find it funny, he thinks ‘I am!’, not ‘I think, therefore I am’
-from the position of the caged creature

Elizabeth Costello, ‘The Philosophers&theAnimals’

-the chimpanzee Sultan, he is able to use insrtrumental logic, similar to human
-‘the fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs’ – the idea of
colectivity, hieratical scale affected by how well they perform
-one of the moment when Coetzee telescopes the embodiement of the caged creature

Last chapter of Elizabeth,’At the Gate’:

-writes back to Kafka
-‘she somehow is this body’
-some kind of vision of limbo, very Kafkaesque
-‘the ram is not an idea, the ram is alive though right now is dying’ – feeling what other creature
feels
-the ram=symbol of the sacrifice
-empathy
-radical language skepticism of modernism
-the experience of how words become dead
Postscript: A letter written by Elizabeth, a different utopian vision, the potential to utter the
primary communion – the body ecstasy
-the ram is also a body, all animals have bodies -> revelation, communion in a theological sense,
recalls episode of Odyssey
-one gesture shifts the meaning of that communion
-reaches out to the concept of writing as a communion

El Anatsui, Duasa I – reused candles, each candle brings its own history

WEEK 1: Defining the modern/Modernism. Modern / modernity / Modernism: definitions, backgrounds,

cultural-historical contexts. Modernism in the arts vs. literary modernism: the aesthetics of the modern.
WEEK 2: The idea of the modern: paradigm changes in the sciences, philosophy, psychology. Linguistic
skepticism and the linguistic turn. The aesthetic of realism vs. Modernism: realist and modernist mimesis,
“declarative” vs. “interrogative” textuality. 
WEEK 3: The turn of the century and the emergence of early Modernism: the ‘World’ and the ‘Self’/
‘private’ and ‘public’. Perspective and focalization; Impressionism. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim.
WEEK 4: Modernist reactions: history, material culture, urbanization; the new sensibility, the modern
self; the sense of unease in culture. Aldous Huxley: Point Counterpoint; D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow. 
WEEK 5: Towards a new realism: Impressionism, interiority, the narration of the mobile mind.
Narrative, time, memory in High Modernism. Experiments with new forms and technologies: Virginia
Woolf, To the Lighthouse; James Joyce, Ulysses (fragm.). 
WEEKS 6-7: Problematizing modernism: the language turn, modes of irony, tradition and intertextuality.
High Modernism: parody, excessive textuality, unbound semiosis. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man / Ulysses / Finnegans Wake (fragm.).
WEEK 8: Dismantling Modernist mimeticism – late modernist experimenting with fictionality and anti-
mimetic modes. The origins of postmodern metafiction: Samuel Beckett, Murphy (chp. 1-3); Flann
O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (fragm.).
WEEK 9: Postmodernism: contexts, definitions. Postmodernism in architecture, the visual arts,
performance art, cinema. Postmodern textuality.
WEEKS 10-11: Narrating the past: rewriting history and the new historical novel in Britain.
Historiographic metafiction: Graham Swift, Waterland; Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot. The
postmodern rewriting of history, nation, gender, and the self: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children;
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (optional).
WEEKS 12-13: Alternative narratives – fiction(ality), life writing. The ethical turn in postmodernism.
Ian McEwan, Atonement. Postmodernism – at an end, or the revenant? “Prefix-modernisms”
(Metamodernism, Altermodernism, Remodernism, etc.) and the precedence of ethical concerns. J.M.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello.