ELIT 48C: Class # 28

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 overclothedblindness to a naked vision”- Dylan Thomas

AGENDA

American Literature since 1945

Postmodern Manifestos Sukenick Gass Thompson Olson

American Literature 1945 to the Present

An Introduction

December 1, 1941, Washington, D.C. President Roosevelt addresses the people of the United States in his “fireside chat,” in which he told them “we are going to win the war and the peace that follows.”

Roosevelt’s words were prophetic: The United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower. “This new power, experienced both at home and abroad, became a major force in reshaping American culture for the balance of the twentieth century” (NAAL 3).

World War II and Its Aftermath

The war cost the lives of 50-70 million people world wide; almost quarter of million died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Historians and politicians continue to debate whether the use of nuclear weapons was necessary to end the war, but what remains undisputed is that the possibility of nuclear warfare radically changed the nature of global politics for the rest of the twentieth century.

World War II and Its AftermathThe Cold War between the United States and the U.S.S.R. was a delicate chess match between these two superpowers as they built up their nuclear arsenals and recruited (often aggressively) smaller nations to their sides.

These "Package" shelters (1955) for large and small families were self-contained units that required no external connections and were capable of sustaining a family for three to five days without outside assistance.

The fear of nuclear war was a consistent feature of post-war American life.

McCarthy group at hearings, June 7, 1954. Senator Joseph McCarthy (left), Pvt. G. David Schine (center), and Roy Cohn (right).

The Cold War was not only an arms race between the USA and the U.S.S.R. It was also an ideological battle over the merits of Western capitalism and Soviet socialism.

The efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy to root out socialist influence in American political life became a focal point of media and popular attention. McCarthy’s allegations (which turned out to be exaggerated if not outright fabricated) that the U.S. government had been infiltrated by socialists spoke to the fear and anxiety that defined the moment.

World War II and Its Aftermath

World War II and Its Aftermath

J. Howard Miller’s We Can Do It poster from 1942.

The post World War II United States can be defined in terms of both economic prosperity and the radical transformation of cultural norms.

With men off to war “the vastly expanded workforce required increasing numbers of women. After [the war] many of these women were reluctant to return to homemaking; and then after a decade or so […], women emerged as a political force on behalf of their rights and opportunities in the workplace. This pattern extended to other groups as well. African Americans, whether they enlisted or were drafted, served in fighting units throughout the war and were unwilling to return to second-class status afterward; nor could a majority culture aware of their contribution continue to enforce segregation and other forms of prejudice so easily as before the war” (NAAL 4).

The Civil Rights Movement

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led an estimated 10,000 civil rights marchers out on the last leg of their Selma-to-Montgomery march. May 28, 1961, Montgomery, Alabama.

The Civil Rights Movement was one of the defining features of the postwar cultural revolution as thousands of African Americans took to the streets to demand their equal rights in society.

Voices of the Cultural RevolutionA group of women rally at the Statue of Liberty in support of the recent passage of the Equal Rights Amendment by the United States House of Representatives. August 10, 1970. The bill did not survive in the U.S. Senate.

Women as well as racial minorities seized upon the changing climate of the post-war years to demand greater equality.

Voices of the Cultural Revolution

Protesters at an anti-Vietnam War rally hold signs bearing antiwar and anti-draft slogans along with quotes from Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

“Active dissension within the culture emerged in response to military involvement in Vietnam, where in 1961 President Kennedy had sent small numbers of advisers to help the Republic of South Vietnam resist pressures from Communist North Vietnam. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon expanded and continued the U.S. presence; and an increasingly strident opposition—fueled by protests on American college campuses and among the country’s liberal intellectuals—turned into a much larger cultural revolution” (NAAL 6).

Voices of the Cultural Revolution

Gay and lesbian activists prepare for a Gay and Lesbian Pride parade in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. June 25, 1983, Des Moines, Iowa.

The riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City mark the beginning of the modern Gay Rights movement. Stonewall was a gay-friendly bar in the progressive Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan that was frequently subjected to police raids. On June 28, 1969, bar patrons actively resisted arrest and a series of riots broke out among the gay and lesbian residents of Greenwich Village. One year later, the first Gay and Lesbian Pride parades took place in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Such parades have been a staple of the Gay Rights movement for the last forty years.

All of this Post War Activity Stimulated another Political,

Social, and Artistic Turn: Postmodernism

Group Discussion: Postmodern Manifestos

Hunter S Thompson(1937-2005)

William H Gass(1924- )

Ronald Sukenick(1932 – 2004)

“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. Q: How does Ronald Sukenick’s advice on writing a

novel differ from Willa Cather’s advice about the same?

2. Q: Why is it more important that fiction be experiential, rather than experimental?

3. Q: What does Ronald Sukenick mean when stating, “no one takes novels seriously”?

4. Q: When technology take over even more, will reading be over?

William H. GassGass– 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: Gass1. Q: What meaning was Gass trying to convey in “The Medium of

Fiction”?

2. Q: Why is word choice important to Gass and how can the meaning influence the text?

3. Q: What does William Gass intend when including the quotation, “..he did not have enough imagination to become a first-rate mathematician” in regards to his literary manifesto?

4. Q: How are the ways that modernists and postmodernists look at literature different?

5. Q: What qualities, in specific, distinguish postmodern literature from modern literature? How do we see these in Gass’s manifesto?

“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: Thompson1. Q: Thompson’s writing seems to be very fictional and new

compared to other stories that we have read.

2. Q. Was Hunter S. Thompson disturbed?

3. Q: What does acid have to do with the post modernist manifestos?

4. Q. In terms of literary criticism, is there a school of drug/psychedelic criticism?

5. Q. Has our reality become something akin to what Thompson describes in his manifesto?

6. Q: How does one’s perception of reality form one’s opinion of it?

HOMEWORK

Read “Postmodern Manifestos” 400-17

Read Mary Klages “Postmodernism.” There is a link to this article on the website home page.

Post #28 QHQ on one of the following: Olson O’Hara Bishop Ammons Lorde