Core Concept #7: 3/7/11-3/18/11

Modernism

• Disillusionment following WWI - many expatriates
• Stein - "Lost Generation"
• New narrative techniques
• Slogan: "Make it new!"
• Throw out old philosophies, especially arts (which could create a false picture of reality)
• Suspicion of the tools of art (during the olden eras, artists were too manipulative)
• New forms of narrative
• Unreliable narrators and multiple narrators
• Minor characters as 1st person narrators
• Nonlinear narrative
• Stream of consciousness
• Connection: Such characteristics are common in many novels published today
• Readers were no longer expected to accept the story passively
• Superimposition: one point of view layered over another (the truth lies where they intersect)
• Belief: There must be a universal truth
• Tragedies like WWI wouldn't happen again if we knew this truth
• What is the universal truth? Something that is true for all people in all times in all places

Then WWII happens...

Postmodernism

• Connection: Death of a Salesman, which we've previously read, was a postmodernist piece
• Postmodernism arrived in the U.S. and U.K. at different times: Why?
• The U.S. got TV right after WWII (postermodernism start then)
• U.K. got TV in '60s (postmodernism start then)
• Why TV? The local point of view ceased to be the only one. Teachers and parents are not always right. People began to see global points of views
• Postmodernism = Modernism - Universal Truth + Irony
• Terrifying thought: our lives are meaningless!
• Everything means nothing, so let's make fun of everything!
• Characteristics
• All truth is local
• Blending of high and low culture
• Connection: We studied such phenomenon in AP U.S. History
• No boundaries (No reason why fictions can't be mixed up, or interactive)
• The Simulacrum (Endless loop of self-reference is so self-reinforcing that a simulated world is more real to us than reality. This false copy has in essence become reality)
• Self-reference (An endless repetition of in-jokes; i.e. a video refering to another video)

Surrealism

• A movement in the arts (visual, musical, dramatic, literary) between WWI and WWII
• Connection: We studied the artworks of Salvador Dali (a surrealist artist) in Spanish
• Uses unexpected juxtapositions in ways intended to activate subconscious associations that highlight truths hidden from us when we are trapped in linear, logical, patterns of thought
• Uses juxtaposition of images, words, etc. determined by psychological thought processes rather than logical thought processes
• Attempts to join the worlds of dreams and fantasy to "reality" to create a larger reality - a "surreality"
• Dreamlike, playful, sometimes eerie or bizarre
• Influenced by the work of Freud and Jung
• Connection: See previous notes for more on Freud and Jung's philosophies

The Hollow Men

• "A penny for the Old Guy" refers to paying to cross the River Styx
• "valley of dying stars" refers to the Valley of Despair of the psalms
• The "multifoliate rose" is a classic allusion to Christ
• "For Thine is / Life is / For Thine is the" is a prayer that is almost finished, but the person cannot finish it
• Famous line: "This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper"
• Questions
• What do the eyes symbolize?
• What do the kingdoms symbolize?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• Poem begins with an exerpt from Dante's Inferno: significance? Foreshadowing. We now know that the poem ends badly because Prufrock tells us in the very beginning that, "If I believed my answer were beign given to someone who could ever return to the world...", thus we (the audience) is in hell, which we can never leave
• Reinforces the modernist idea that Earth is hell and hell is Earth
• Who is the poem addressed to? Three possibilities:
• You = unknown audience who can't respond
• You = Prufrock (he's arguing with himself: it's an internal monologue)
• You = some guy (Prufrock's just talking to this random guy)
• What is the "overwhelming question?"
• "There will be time to murder and create"
• Bible reference (there is a time for everything)
• It's not a paraphrase, it's not mocking, but there's been disturbing diction changes
• New meaning: something needs to die, and it needs to be replaced
• "For the yellow smoke that slides along the street"
• The fog is like a pet following Prufrock, trying to get into the party
• Elliot is tying Prufrock to the industrial revolution (Prufrock is personifying the era)
• "Before the taking of a toast and tea"
• Like a modern sacrament; debasing; people are so trivial that they just get toast and tea
• "Time to turn back and descend the stair"
• French expression for when you want to reverse time because you just thought of the perfect zinger too late
• "Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets"
• What Prufrock wants to say, but he keeps on being distracted by the women!
• "the eternal Footman" = grim reaper
• "Almost, at times, the Fool"
• Prufrock's ridiculous, so he can tell us the truth
• "I grow old...I grow old..."
• Epizeuxis
• Turning point of poem because Prufrock has finally reached his final decision
• "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
• Prufrock has reached his mid-life crisis
• Peach is a literary symbol for the female genitalia
• "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each." **sad pause** "I do not think that they will sing to me"
• Prufrock is still under the spell of the mermaids, like sirens