world lit ii - class notes for april 19, 2012

World Literature II Renaissance to the Present

Dr. Michael Broder University of South Carolina

April 19, 2012

The ^Twentieth Century

POSTMODERNISM

Late

“Half-suffocated summer gods grope in the sea mist.”

Tomas Tranströmer “Evening—Morning”

Edgar Varèse (1883 – 1965)

The Holocaust, 1933-1945

German invasion of Poland, September 1939

German “Blitz” of Britain and Northern Ireland, September 1940 – May 1941

Japanese attack on US naval base in Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Liberation of the camps, 1944-45

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945)

“No poetry after Auschwitz”

T.W. Adorno (1903 – 1969), German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist

and composer

Jackson Pollock Shimmering Substance (1946)

John Cage (1912 – 1992)

Berlin Blockade & Airlift, 1948-49

Jasper Johns Flag (1954-5)

East German border guard Conrad Schumann leaps into the French Sector of West Berlin over barbed wire on

August 15, 1961.

Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)

Vietnam War, 1955-1975

Tom Wesselmann Still Life #20 (1962)

Buddhist monk burns himself on a Saigon street to protest persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government

(1963)

James Rosenquist President Elect (1960-1, 1964)

Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief, 1968

Roy Lichtenstein Whaam! (1963)

Paris, May 1968

•  Massive confrontations between police and students brought workers out on a general strike and brought the government to the point of collapse

•  Clashes followed between police and students on countries all around the world, and would have a lasting political impact

Jean-Luc Godard La Chinoise (1967)

Apollo 11 lands on the moon, 1969

Girl running down a road after a South Vietnamese napalm attack, 1972

The Polish trade union Solidarity emerged on August 31, 1980 at the Gdańsk Shipyard under the

leadership of Lech Lech Wałęsa

Jean-Michel Basquiat Mona Lisa (1983)

President Reagan speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall, June 12, 1987

David Hockney Pearblossom Highway (1986)

On the 9th of November, 1989, the Border separating Western from Eastern Germany was

effectively opened.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)

•  Being and Nothingness (1943)

•  Existentialism •  Existence precedes

essence •  That is, you are a

material body before you are a thinking, feeling person

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009)

•  Structuralism •  The human mind is

structured according to binary oppositions like male/female, high/low, raw/cooked

•  The members of the binary are defined in terms of each other

•  All of these binaries for a structure, each part of which is defined in terms of every other part

Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

•  Critiqued Enlightenment concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination as socially constructed rather than natural

•  Focused on the ways in which such constructs can foster cultural hegemony, violence and exclusion

•  That is, those in power get to determine what human nature is and who gets to be classified as “human” (as well as who does not)

Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004)

•  Deconstruction •  The binary oppositions of

structuralism are inherently instable

•  The privileged pole of the binary requires the devalued pole of the binary for its own definition

•  The devalued pole of the binary presents a constant threat to the centrality of the privileged pole

The Civil Rights Movement

Resisted oppression on the basis of RACE

The Feminist Movement

Resisted oppression on the basis of GENDER

The Gay Rights Movement

Resisted oppression on the basis of SEXUALITY

The Postcolonial Movement

Fought for the independence of colonies and the end of IMPERIALISM

I dreamt that I was to start school but arrived late. Everyone in the room wore white masks on their faces. It was impossibe to know which was the teacher.

Tomas Tranströmer “Grief Gondola #2”

World Literature II Renaissance to the Present

Dr. Michael Broder University of South Carolina

April 19, 2012