postmodern quote

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Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture Beware of the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be. What is presented, so much of the time, as a body of active and positive thought is in fact a body lost in a prison of empty definition and cliche. Ideas endlessly repeated and permutated become platitudinous, trite, meaningless. Clive Bell, Significant Form There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl , Chinese carpets, Giotto 's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art. Raymond Williams (1921–1988) It was certainly an error to suppose that values or art-works could be adequately studied without reference to the particular society within which they were expressed, but it is equally an error to suppose that the social explanation is determining, or that the values and works are mere by-products. We have got into the habit, since we realized how deeply works or values could be determined by the whole situation in which they are expressed, of asking about these relationships in a standard form: "what is the relationship of this art to this society? Moral Technology – Production of subject A moral technology consists of a particular set of techniques and practices for the instilling of specific kinds of value, discipline, behaviour, and response in human subjects: and one rather important type of moral technology in our own day goes under the name of Literature. …. Ideal Literary Criticism It would strive to relate such “cultural” practices to other forms of social activity and to transform the cultural apparatuses themselves. It would articulate its “cultural” analysis with a constant political intervention. It would deconstruct the received hierarchies of

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Harold Pinter – Nobel LectureBeware of the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be. What is presented, so much of the time, as a body of active and positive thought is in fact a body lost in a prison of empty definition and cliche. Ideas endlessly repeated and permutated become platitudinous, trite, meaningless.Clive Bell, Significant FormThere must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl , Chinese carpets, Giotto 's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art.Raymond Williams (1921–1988)It was certainly an error to suppose that values or art-works could be adequately studied without reference to the particular society within which they were expressed, but it is equally an error to suppose that the social explanation is determining, or that the values and works are mere by-products. We have got into the habit, since we realized how deeply works or values could be determined by the whole situation in which they are expressed, of asking about these relationships in a standard form: "what is the relationship of this art to this society?Moral Technology – Production of subjectA moral technology consists of a particular set of techniques and practices for the instilling of specific kinds of value, discipline, behaviour, and response in human subjects: and one rather important type of moral technology in our own day goes under the name of Literature. ….Ideal Literary CriticismIt would strive to relate such “cultural” practices to other forms of social activity and to transform the cultural apparatuses themselves. It would articulate its “cultural” analysis with a constant political intervention. It would deconstruct the received hierarchies of “literature” and transvaluate the received judgements and assumptions; engage with the language of “unconscious” of literary texts to reveal their role in the ideological construction of the subject and mobilize such texts… in a struggle to transform those subjects within a wider political context.Modernism Eagleton’s excuseTo fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and deranges its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysteriously autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real. Brooding self-reflexively on its own being, it distances itself through irony from the shame of being no more than a brute, self-identical thing. But the most devastating irony of all is that in doing this the modernist work escapes from one form of commodification only to fall prey to another. 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'In bracketing off the real social world, establishing a critical, negating distance between itself and the ruling social order, modernism must simultaneously bracket off the political forces which seek to transform that order. There is indeed a political modernism -- what else is Bertolt Brecht? -- but it is hardly characteristic of the movement as a whole (Eagleton).

Modernism to PostmodernismThe traditional metaphysical mystery was a question of depths, absences, foundations, abysmal explorations; the mystery of some modernist art is just the mind-bending truth that things are what they are, intriguingly selfidentical, utterly shorn of cause, motive or ratification; postmodernism preserves this self-identity, but erases its modernist scandalousness.Marxism/DeconstructionWhat deconstructs the "inside/outside" antithesis for Marxism is not the Parisian left-intelligentsia but the revolutionary working class. The working class is the agent of historical revolution not because of its potential "consciousness" (Lukacs), but because of that location within the capitalist mode of production ironically assigned to it by capitalism itself. […] Capitalism gives birth to its own gravedigger, nurturing the acolyte who will one day stab the high priest in the back. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which has decreed that the prime agent of its own transformation will be, not peasants, guerillas, blacks, women, or intellectuals, but the industrial proletariat Frederic Jameson, PostmodernismWhat has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation (Jameson, Postmodernism, 1991). This is evidently a much more extreme position than the modest claim, surely acceptable to everyone, that certain texts have social and historical--sometimes even political--resonance. .. I would argue, however, that such information--even where it is not re-contained, as it is in most instances, by an idealistic conception of the history of ideas--does not yield interpretation as such, but rather at best its (indispensable) preconditions. (Jameson 1981)G.B. Shaw –reason for the failure of socialist ideasThey do not want the simple life, nor the aesthetic life [...] What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty [...] To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they prefer the News. (Preface, Major Barbara)Gareth GriffithShaw was like a machine, producing ideas and opinions at a constant rate over seventy years, stretching and pulling the mind of his audience, tugging at its conscience, trying its nerve and tweaking its prejudices. He was one of the master intellectuals of his age, a prince in the universe of progressive thought. Office in Burma: Wigan PierI was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. […] I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants (Wigan Pier 185).Orwell: “Why I Write”In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, giving me some understanding of the nature of imperialism... Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. Roots of Woolf’s feminism

We range Edwardians and Georgians into two camps; Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy I will call the Edwardians; Mr. Forster, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Eliot I will call the Georgians... Mr. Arnold Bennett says[…] that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennett and quite unreal to me. …Virginia Woolf

The intellect seems to predominate and the other fascilities of the mind harden and become barren

Here then was I (call me Mery Beton, Mery Seton, Mery Carmichael - or by any name you please, it is not of any importance).....

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of men at twice its natural size

The glories of all our wars would be unknown. Judith lives on in you and me, and in many other women who are not here tonight,...

Consciousness - under the control of the egoFor indeed our consciousness does not create itself--it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconsciousness. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious....It is not only influenced by the unconscious but continually emerges out of it in the form of numberless spontaneous ideas and sudden flashes of thought. (Letters, 569-70)The UnconsciousThe unconscious depicts an extremely fluid state of affairs; everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that take shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious. (M&S. 95)Literature of Exhaustion

Literature of Replenishment

PostmodernismPostmodernist fiction: interested in interrogating this claim of realist fiction and many of the narrative techniques associated with postmodernism function to pursue this aim. These techniques include metafiction; the disruption of the linear flow of narratives and the relationship between cause and effect; challenging the authority of the author; the use of events and characters drawn from fantasy; selfreflexivity drawing attention to the language that is being used to construct the fiction; the use of parody and pastiche, and more generally a skepticism towards fixed ideologies and philosophies. PoststructiralismLanguage, far from being a transparent tool that allows people to describe the world in an accurate way, is in fact more like a gauze or filter through which the world is textually reconstructed. This emphasis on the constructedness of language has challenged the assumption in much realist fiction that the way in

which an author used language was as an aid to expressing emotions faithfully or describing aspects of the real world accurately.Poststructuralism: realistic experience through the medium of language is fraught with problems and that when someone attempts to write about some aspect of the world, they are not simply describing what is already there, but constructing it anew, and creating it in a textual form. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me’. Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen (Claude Levi-Strauss). John Banville: “When I look inside myself, I don’t find a John Banville. I increasingly have come to the conclusion that there is no self. There is an infinite succession of selves” (Interview). History

White: [History]Contains a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be” (ix).

Tom Crick (Waterland): I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama” (40).

Hutcheon: [Interaction of historiography and fiction], “issues surrounding the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation; the intertextual nature of the past; and the ideological implications of writing about history” (Hutcheon, Poetics 117).

Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis[T]hose who have arrived from once-colonized countries in London and their descendants have since the 1950s represented their experience in a 'new place' which, by their very presence, has itself been made new (McLeod 2004: 3)Until ‘50s Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, 1930In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response… The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time F.R. Leavis… Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age… [showing] the direction in which to go. In their keeping…is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By 'culture' I mean the use of such language. Mathew Arnold

Our ordinary selves, … do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the class to which we belong; [in these] we are separate, impersonal, at war; … by our best selves we are united, personal, at harmony.

[T]he best that has been thought and said.T.S. Eliot

Culture… includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

Raymond Williams – Culture and SocietyIt was certainly an error to suppose that values or art-works could be adequately studied without reference to the particular society within which they were expressed, but it is equally an error to

suppose that the social explanation is determining, or that the values and works are mere by-products. We have got into the habit, since we realized how deeply works or values could be determined by the whole situation in which they are expressed, of asking about these relationships in a standard form: "what is the relationship of this art to this society?Terry Eagleton

My own view is that it is most useful to see 'literature' as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called 'discursive practices', and that if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled 'literature'.