Class Notes (3/7 - 3/18)

3/14- 3/16 was spent watching the "quality" Bollywood film, Bride and Prejudice. We finished out 3/17 and 3/18 reading Camus' L'Étranger.

Modernism:

• Many people (and writers and artists) were disillusioned after WWI
• Expatriates were moving to France
• Cri de couer (which means "Cry of the heart): aka, "Make it new"
• The "Lost Generation" term was created by Gertrude Stein; it was used to refer to the generation that "came of age" during WWI
• New narrative techniques resulted: unreliable narrators, multiple narrators, minor characters (as 1st person narrators), nonlinear narratives, and stream of consciousness

Outside Connection: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a Modernist text. (It is also one of my favorite novels! )

Post Modernism:

• The birth of TV shows that all truth is local
• There is no "one truth!"
• The ingenious formula for Post Modernism: modernism + irony
• High and low culture is mixing is a result of Post Mod.
• The Simulacrum: a world where a flawed copy has replaced reality; idea by Jean Baudrillard; Ex: Nuclear weapons as a useable weapon (we create them, but never intend to use them)
• self-reference: people in a mediated world can manifest themselves in other places
• The picture below, taken from Wikipedia, shows a dragon that continuously consumes itself; it represents self-reference

Outside Connection: The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles, is an example of a Post-Modern text. It especially follows the idea of there not being "one truth" because Fowles gives the audience THREE different endings for the book!

Surrealism:

• defined as a movement of the arts, whether it be dramatic, literary, musical or visual, between WWI and WWII
• Surrealism uses "unexpected juxtaposition" through methods that intend to activate our subconscious associations; these focus on truths that are hidden from us when we are in logical and linear patterns of thought
• sometimes illogical, dream-like, and playful
• Freud and Jung's work influenced it
• uses the differences between images and words, decided by psychological attempts to merge the worlds of fantasy and dreams to reality; the goal is to create a "surreality," a larger and more meaninful reality

Outside Connection:

The famous piece of art, The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí is an example of one of his many Surrealist works. It has a prominent dream-like quality to it.