We will discuss this
when your father
gets home!
Wow! Will
he last
longer in
that outfit?
Farther versus Further
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
“the rhythmic, inevitably
narrative, movement
from an overclothed
blindness to a naked
vision”
- Dylan Thomas
 Lecture: Postmodernism
o Postmodern Manifestos
 Lecture: Invisible Man
o “Prologue”
 What is postmodernism?
 the experimental aesthetic movements of the post–World War
II era
 a multi-faceted engagement with modernist aesthetics and
philosophy
 a rejection of modernism
 a continuation of the “unfinished project” of modernism
 a self-critical reflection on modernism
From Modernism to Postmodernism
 Rejects 19th-century sociological realism and 20th-century
psychological realism
 Considers history and fiction both as products of the
imagination
 Questions whether literature can represent reality
 Focuses self-reflexively on language itself
Postmodern Fiction
 A shift from the poem as artifact to the poem as open-ended
process
 An increasing emphasis on the unconscious, accident, and
chance
 A growing focus on the body, gender, and women’s
experiences
 A greater sense of the poet’s personal life reflected in the
poetry itself
Postmodern Poetry
QHQs Mary Klages
1. Am I the only person who doesn’t understand postmodernism after
reading this article?
2. What separates Postmodernism from modernism?
3. Can we understand postmodernism without modernism?
4. Is Postmodernism an improvement on Modernism?
5. How can you simplify Postmodernism? How would analyzing
postmodernist work be different than examining modernism?
6. How does postmodernism rejects grand narratives in favor for mini-
narratives?
7. Even though Postmodernism occurs after modernism, why does
postmodernism focus more on the ideologies of the past rather than
developing new interpretations?
8. How has communication changed in a postmodern society?
9. How does post-modernism “Play with nonsense”?
1. How, when regarding the ideal sense of ‘self’, is postmodernism
superior to modernism?
2. What are your thoughts on the idea of creating (or identifying)
“order,” and the necessity that in doing such we must also create or
identify “disorder”? In what ways do you identify disorder, and in
what ways do you create disorder?
3. What happens when there is too much information(articles) in the
internet? How does it affect the postmodernist movement in sorting
through the noise?
4. Is postmodernism redefining how knowledge should be utilized?
5. Postmodernism believes anything not “storable by a computer–i.e.
anything that’s not digitizable–will cease to be knowledge”. Do you
agree?
6. Are we living with postmodernism? Or are we living with
modernism?
7. Are we still in a postmodernism movement or are we in a new
unnamed movement?
 “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
QHQ: Sukenick
1. When a new novel is published, how does it
turn from being experimental to progressive?
2. How has fictional writing changed throughout
the years?
3. What does Sukenick mean when he states that
“no one takes novels seriously until they
become movies”?
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.”
QHQ: Gass
1. When William Gass says “In literature… we return to [signs] again and
again” is he proud of it or does he lament it?
2. When Gass ends his essay with “Are you afraid?” what does he mean?
Afraid of what?
3. What qualities, in specific, distinguish postmodern literature from
modern literature? How do we see these in Gass’s manifesto?
4. Why does Gass’ writing form have the occasional, recurring grammar
errors?
5. According to Gass, how do concepts convey meaning?
6. What is a new novel? How do we create one? Will there be a point
where people will no longer be able to write new novels?
“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).
QHQ: Thompson
1. What did I just read?
1. Why is the fear and loathing in the manifestos?
2. What does Las Vegas represent to Thompson and why does
he choose this as a setting for his novel?
1. What does Thompson portray about human nature and why
does Thompson imply that he has had enough of people’s
capacity for idiocy?
2. What elements of post-modernism exist in the excerpt from
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Anthology?
“(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
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?
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.”
QHQ O’Hara
O’Hara seems sarcastic in a way about his ‘creation of
personism’. Is O’Hara serious about Personism?
How is O’Hara’s essay or prose poem (Personalism: A
Manifesto) a parody?
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.”
QHQ Bishop
1. What is Elizabeth Bishop’s point?
2. Is it considered unacceptable to incorporate and alter
aspects of one’s life into a work of fiction or poetry, as
Robert Lowell did in Dolphin?
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”
QHQ Ammons
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.”
QHQ Lorde
1. What is a possible interpretation of poetry being a skeleton
architecture of our lives?
2. Compare and contrast Lorde’s postmodern manifesto and
background to Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto.
Selections from Invisible
Man
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?
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
QHQ: Prologue
1. What does Ellison mean by being an “Invisible Man”?
And why do people interpret his work as a statement
about African Americans?
1. is the man really invisible?
2. Why couldn’t the tall, blonde man see the narrator, or
why is the narrator invisible to him?
3. How does being a minority feel like being the
equivalent of invisible?
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
 Essay #1 due Friday
at noon

Elit 48 c class 17 post qhq

  • 1.
    We will discussthis 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.
    “the rhythmic, inevitably narrative,movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision” - Dylan Thomas
  • 4.
     Lecture: Postmodernism oPostmodern Manifestos  Lecture: Invisible Man o “Prologue”
  • 5.
     What ispostmodernism?  the experimental aesthetic movements of the post–World War II era  a multi-faceted engagement with modernist aesthetics and philosophy  a rejection of modernism  a continuation of the “unfinished project” of modernism  a self-critical reflection on modernism From Modernism to Postmodernism
  • 6.
     Rejects 19th-centurysociological realism and 20th-century psychological realism  Considers history and fiction both as products of the imagination  Questions whether literature can represent reality  Focuses self-reflexively on language itself Postmodern Fiction
  • 7.
     A shiftfrom the poem as artifact to the poem as open-ended process  An increasing emphasis on the unconscious, accident, and chance  A growing focus on the body, gender, and women’s experiences  A greater sense of the poet’s personal life reflected in the poetry itself Postmodern Poetry
  • 8.
    QHQs Mary Klages 1.Am I the only person who doesn’t understand postmodernism after reading this article? 2. What separates Postmodernism from modernism? 3. Can we understand postmodernism without modernism? 4. Is Postmodernism an improvement on Modernism? 5. How can you simplify Postmodernism? How would analyzing postmodernist work be different than examining modernism? 6. How does postmodernism rejects grand narratives in favor for mini- narratives? 7. Even though Postmodernism occurs after modernism, why does postmodernism focus more on the ideologies of the past rather than developing new interpretations? 8. How has communication changed in a postmodern society? 9. How does post-modernism “Play with nonsense”?
  • 9.
    1. How, whenregarding the ideal sense of ‘self’, is postmodernism superior to modernism? 2. What are your thoughts on the idea of creating (or identifying) “order,” and the necessity that in doing such we must also create or identify “disorder”? In what ways do you identify disorder, and in what ways do you create disorder? 3. What happens when there is too much information(articles) in the internet? How does it affect the postmodernist movement in sorting through the noise? 4. Is postmodernism redefining how knowledge should be utilized? 5. Postmodernism believes anything not “storable by a computer–i.e. anything that’s not digitizable–will cease to be knowledge”. Do you agree? 6. Are we living with postmodernism? Or are we living with modernism? 7. Are we still in a postmodernism movement or are we in a new unnamed movement?
  • 11.
     “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
  • 12.
    QHQ: Sukenick 1. Whena new novel is published, how does it turn from being experimental to progressive? 2. How has fictional writing changed throughout the years? 3. What does Sukenick mean when he states that “no one takes novels seriously until they become movies”?
  • 13.
    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.”
  • 14.
    QHQ: Gass 1. WhenWilliam Gass says “In literature… we return to [signs] again and again” is he proud of it or does he lament it? 2. When Gass ends his essay with “Are you afraid?” what does he mean? Afraid of what? 3. What qualities, in specific, distinguish postmodern literature from modern literature? How do we see these in Gass’s manifesto? 4. Why does Gass’ writing form have the occasional, recurring grammar errors? 5. According to Gass, how do concepts convey meaning? 6. What is a new novel? How do we create one? Will there be a point where people will no longer be able to write new novels?
  • 15.
    “On the upstairsbalconies, 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).
  • 16.
    QHQ: Thompson 1. Whatdid I just read? 1. Why is the fear and loathing in the manifestos? 2. What does Las Vegas represent to Thompson and why does he choose this as a setting for his novel? 1. What does Thompson portray about human nature and why does Thompson imply that he has had enough of people’s capacity for idiocy? 2. What elements of post-modernism exist in the excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Anthology?
  • 17.
    “(1) the kineticsof 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
  • 18.
    QHQ Olson 1. Howimportant 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?
  • 19.
    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.”
  • 20.
    QHQ O’Hara O’Hara seemssarcastic in a way about his ‘creation of personism’. Is O’Hara serious about Personism? How is O’Hara’s essay or prose poem (Personalism: A Manifesto) a parody?
  • 21.
    ELIZABETH BISHOP  “Ingeneral, 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.”
  • 22.
    QHQ Bishop 1. Whatis Elizabeth Bishop’s point? 2. Is it considered unacceptable to incorporate and alter aspects of one’s life into a work of fiction or poetry, as Robert Lowell did in Dolphin?
  • 23.
    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”
  • 24.
  • 25.
    AUDRE LORDE  “Poetryis 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.”
  • 26.
    QHQ Lorde 1. Whatis a possible interpretation of poetry being a skeleton architecture of our lives? 2. Compare and contrast Lorde’s postmodern manifesto and background to Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto.
  • 27.
  • 28.
    Prologue 1. What doesthe 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?
  • 29.
    The Prologue  What doesthe 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
  • 30.
    QHQ: Prologue 1. Whatdoes Ellison mean by being an “Invisible Man”? And why do people interpret his work as a statement about African Americans? 1. is the man really invisible? 2. Why couldn’t the tall, blonde man see the narrator, or why is the narrator invisible to him? 3. How does being a minority feel like being the equivalent of invisible?
  • 31.
    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  Essay #1 due Friday at noon

Editor's Notes

  • #6 A good place to start a discussion of postmodernism is by wrestling with the term itself. Have any of your students ever encountered the term? Do any of them know what it means? Even if they don’t know, what does the term suggest? If “modern” suggests “the present,” how can you be “post-” the present? What ironies or contradictions are implied by the term? Help your students to see that the contradiction implied by the term is part of its appeal, and that debating the term is as important as defining it. Let your students know that “postmodernism” means different things to different people, and that the lack of consensus over how to define the term itself is what has made postmodernism such a vibrant literary and philosophical movement.
  • #8 “After several decades in which impersonality and objectivity were the key values in poetry criticism, poets shifted the focus from the poem as artifact . . . to the poem as open-ended process. The unconscious began to take up a larger place in poetry, and accident and chance became, at times, structuring principles . . . For some poets a focus on the body brought attention to issues of gender and the ways in which the particularity of a woman’s embodied experiences had been silenced in poetry . . . A poetry open to the unconscious and centered in the body became more personal, inviting into the poem the particulars of a poet’s life” (NAAL 400).