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0:03
all right everybody welcome back to introduction to u.s multicultural literatures today we are turning to a different uh unit or uh i don't like unit that sounds sort of high school-ish let's say a chapter that sounds literary a different chapter in the class where we will be turning to perhaps the most controversial of the isms we're looking at throughout this course which is post-modernism
0:28
so let me just repeat what i said uh early in the semester which is i've organized this class according to the isms these kinds of broad movements in literary and cultural history that we've seen throughout the last hundred years but i think i did warn you that these isms are only ever approximations when you're talking about individual works of art and literature no individual work perfectly correlates with any broad movement these movements are named to try
1:01
to capture broad tendencies but the point of of literature the point of art is to be very singular to be very individual to surprise us as i think i mentioned earlier in the class i don't think any interesting work of literature is ever simply in one genre but occupies multiple genres i think that same goes for these broader movements that i i don't think these are genres which are sort of um ways of organizing works that have long traditions but these are kind of movements these
1:34
isms um and it the reason there are so many isms is precisely because of what we were talking about at the very beginning of the class that with the collapse in certain received narratives that told us what history and culture were supposed to be and with the relativizing of culture to cultures that we saw at the beginning of the 20th century it was no longer clear how you know artists and
2:00
writers were to go about their business so they all had to kind of write manifestos and come up with movements that told them how to do so in the absence of a generally agreed upon social ground and social mission of art so hence you get modernism's rupture with tradition and hence you get post-modernism even deeper rupture with tradition including some of the traditions it inherits from the early 20th century modernists so in post-modernism though more than any other
2:34
ism is a word that is thrown around and has been for about 40 years not even to discuss art but to talk about general social movements political movements the character of our society we live in post-modern times people say some people are quite postmodernism is very controversial some people say it doesn't really exist it was a trend in the 80s and it's over now some people say it's ruined our society it's fiercely criticized on both the political left and the political right
3:06
for having corrupted politics for reasons i think i'll be able to explain shortly so it's a very controversial word and seems to apply to more than just the arts and it seems to be a descriptor not only for art and literature in a certain period roughly the late 20th century but also for the general condition of society in that period so what is postmodernism it's going to take me a little while to explain i'll probably spend more of this lecture on the theoretical stuff
3:38
and then i'll get to the poetry i'd like to look at later and i'll probably have to carry over the discussion of the poetry until the next lecture that'll cut in a little bit to our first lecture on philip roth's the ghost writer but that's a very short book that's a shorter book i think than the others we've read so i think that's okay so here we go let me just start the first thing i want to do though just think about what i said about modernist architecture in the first lecture
4:06
on mid-century culture i said the characteristics of modernist architecture was uh this kind of this square white building with a lot of glass and steel and kind of exposed concrete it was very rectilinear it was very square it tried to sort of get to the fundamentals the the fundamental shape of architecture and lay bear those fundamentals just as modernism in literature tries if you think of quicksand is a very psychological very inward form of writing
4:42
fiction it tries to lay bear the workings of the psyches of the characters so modernist architects try to lay bare the underlying structures of buildings post modernist poets like gertrude stein try to lay bear the workings of language okay so modernism holds on to this idea that even though we've ruptured with tradition even though we've broken with tradition there's something under it that's real that we're going to show you now look at a key work of post-modernist
5:14
architecture which i've pictured on my slide some of you if you've been on the university of minnesota campus will recognize this building this is the weisman art museum which is uh just at the the uh the end of the washington avenue bridge as you head toward the west bank okay so if you've been on campus you've seen this building this is a building designed by frank gehry g-e-h-r-y one of the foremost post-modernist architects in america he designed this building in 1993
5:48
and you can immediately see some differences from modernist architecture this isn't square the shapes are going all over the place there's a kind of playfulness to where um there i don't think there's a there's even a square in the building there's rounded corners there's um kind of uh what are shapes that aren't square there's like rhombus-like shapes whatever that means um there's that weird if you look over to the far left there's that weird thing
6:18
kind of jutting out that's curved um the building looks like a kind of tin can that's been recycled or something and what is the front of it the front of it looks like kind of aluminum foil it's not the reflective clear reflective glass of the surface of the modernist white square building but it's this kind of blurry reflective foil shape this is playful it's uh it's it's um it's not it's not clearly defined in its geometry postmodernism is all over the place that's the
6:54
idea of postmodernism but why what does it mean i mentioned and we're going to look at some more examples of post-modern visual art in a minute and we're going to look at some post-modern poetry uh shortly but what does it mean i said that many people think that post-modernism is not just a school of art that starts in the you know in the 50s and extends to the end of the 20th century though it is that it's a school of painting of architecture of poetry of fiction
7:23
as we'll see but it's also a general condition of our society that we have entered what theorists have called the post-modern condition so it's not just our art that's post-modern it's our politics it's our science it's our way of organizing our societies in general it's in fact our technology so let's look at some people who have theorized postmodernism i'm going to give you two theories of what postmodernism is and then we'll see how that manifests itself in the arts
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and also what that has to do with multiculturalism we have to talk about what that has to do with this idea that we've been tracking of different definitions of culture
8:09
so i think one of the first main attempts to to define what post-modernism was came from a french philosopher named jean-francois leota in the 1970s and he wrote a very short really just an essay length book called the postmodern condition and what he says in this book he defines postmodernism actually very simply he defines it as a suspicion of grand narratives and what he says is this
8:42
he says modern politics and art made big claims for themselves so think back to i already sort of said this but think back to what i said about modern modernism in the arts we had modernist architecture trying to lay bare the basic structure of architecture we had modernist poetry trying to lay bare the basic structure of language we have modernist fiction trying to lay bear the basic structure of human psychology modern art as much as it broke with tradition still
9:14
made the promise that it was going to tell you a kind of truth that had never been told before think even of langston hughes's poem the negro speaks of rivers that gives you a grand narrative of civilizations outside europe and their sort of great story as they progress toward liberation all right so modern art offers a grand narrative of truth it will tell you the truth about something about the structure of art the structure of the human mind the emancipatory story of individual
9:55
sort of cultural groups ethnic groups racial uh groups there's going to be a grand narrative think also of the martyred what was the kind of question of the martyr the question was whether history has a shape well think about marxism marxism which is a quintessential modern ideology tells us that the history of human society has been the history of struggles between oppressor classes and oppressed classes and eventually this struggle will end when the oppressed class of the
10:29
modern world which is the industrial working class overthrows the ruling class and institutes finally a an equal culture all of history in this sense is moving toward a conclusion this is a grand narrative about how history works modern politics and modern art made big promises about telling big stories that would give you truths that had not been available before the modern that would liberate humanity however as i think the martyred and some of the poetry we read
11:08
such as anthony hecht's more light more light made clear these promises were not kept what actually happened was catastrophe you had the holocaust you had communist totalitarianism you had a general sense of modern the progress of modern technology creating environmental degradation the progress of modern politics in the united states for instance we talked about the uh you know after world war ii you had the gi bill you had the expansion of the middle class you had the
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um growth of suburbanization and yet who was left out of that you had um general exclusions particularly of african americans left out of that big narrative of progress you had what accompanied that what accompanied for instance suburbanization was a reinstitution of the nuclear family and many you know women felt left out of that story because they considered that a kind of relegation to second-class citizenship status so all of this progress all of the these
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promises of truth revealed that they they couldn't they couldn't keep up they couldn't give what they said they would give in that case says leotard the postmodern condition is one in which we've realized that big claims about truth and big stories about progress always leave somebody out and often produce catastrophe rather than liberation or rather than truth and so we should be skeptical of all universal claims to truth because all universal claims to truth
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leave somebody out and instead we should focus on the diversity and plurality of cultures and people and you might say well wasn't that happening in the modernist era i would say yeah there were hints of that happening in the modernist era that uneasily coexisted beside big claims about truth and i hope i demonstrated that uh and i would ask you to think back to alan locke's manifesto of the new negro where we saw
13:21
him hesitating between different options for what african-american emancipation would look like and one of those options i think was quintessentially modern that african-americans would be the kind of leaders of a morally renewed american nation that finally kept its promises to every one of its citizens that's a grand narrative another of his claims was that african americans might be considered sort of culturally separatist might separate themselves off from broader american
13:56
society and from other groups with an american society and sort of conduct their own culture within that group that to me is a postmodern claim so back in the back in the era i called modernist we have a figure like alan locke struggling between these two ideas and that's what i want to tell you about isms they never perfectly capture any one work any one thinker there's always kind of tensions but the postmodern condition is one in which we emphasize the skepticism of
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universal truth claims and focus instead on the diversity and plurality of cultures and people and as a corollary we should understand that all truth claims our narratives our stories or are what leotard calls language games they're social constructs they're made up of language they don't really reflect the truth because it's not within human power for anyone to tell the truth with a capital t that's leotard's theory now another co influential i almost said controversial
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but that's true too uh controversial thinker who defined post-modernism was frederick jameson he is a marxist thinker we've talked about marxism before i talked about it in the last slide and he is much more skeptical about post-modernism or much more skeptical that it's a good thing for leotard it's it's basically a good thing and it's it's an ethical mission you need to be skeptical of universal truth claims because they have been used to abuse and to exclude people there's an
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ethical imperative to be skeptical anytime anybody says they're claiming to tell the truth that's leotard's position jameson says well okay but so he is a marxist which means that he believes in one of these grand narratives he believes in a universal story of human emancipation that is backed up by the history of class struggle and the class struggle will eventually end at least he hopes with the institution of a utopian classless egalitarian society so he looks
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at post-modernism and says actually it's not this great ethical thing that leotard wants to claim it is it's actually just the conditions of what he calls a late capitalist consumer society he says that post-modernism is what happens to a society when it undergoes certain economic changes that happened in the united states and europe and japan and other you know what what used to be called first world countries what happened there was the economy
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shifted from one focused on production to one focused on consumption it used to be that you know a lot of the goods that you would be you know purchase in america if you were a consumer were produced in america but what happens with the deregulation of capitalism in the late 20th century is companies now have the ability to take their production overseas where they're not bound by certain labor laws where they can pay lower wages where they aren't bound even by certain you
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know safety standards in their factories and they can offshore their production so now we live in a society where uh it's basically based entirely on consumption rather than on production and we also live in a society that is international in its capitalism rather than national because all our big companies have these massive overseas holdings and production capabilities so once you move to a consumer society under international capitalism and jameson calls this late because
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he's a marxist so he thinks this is uh you know one of the last things that's going to happen before the revolution i don't mean to say that mockingly but i don't think that's going to happen but that my views are immaterial once that happens once you move to a consumer society then everything looks like it's equal to everything else because everything is equally consumable so all values all forms of art all cultural practices all exist on the same plane
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it says if you went into well and when jamison was writing it was the 80s so you'd go into a mall and you'd see all cultural values are equally on sale now you don't even go to the mall because technological shifts have made it so that you go online and all
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cultural values all forms of art all practices they're all equally for sale on amazon and so what that means is yeah we have the consumer freedom to choose but what that does is it levels everything not just to a kind of relativism but it makes everything kind of a commodity for sale and so all values and boundaries are suspended and keep in mind jameson has an ethical imperative too just as leotard does jamison says this is happening in our society but it's because we still
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live in an extremely economically exploitative uh paradigm it's just that the people being exploited aren't visible to us they're overseas they're being exploited overseas for the consumer goods that make everything seem free and equal to us this freedom and equality this pluralism that leotard praised comes at the expense of a still equal and exploitative society
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but anyway jameson says once um consumer society suspends all traditional hierarchies and values on the relativizing plane of free choice that means that all modern ideas sort of go away history is no longer a narrative because everything is appearing to us simultaneously the self is no longer a coherent subject about which a novelist like nella larson could tell the truth but it's now just made up of all of these different consumer choices
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that it purchases and art because art is now any individual work of art is now on the same plane with every other individual work of art art can no longer be sort of meaningfully true
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art is also kind of relativized and we'll see that one of the implications of post-modernism is you could no longer really say that one form of art or one work of art is better than another so we are just left as d-centered selves that are the um we we are just kind of the the collection of our consumer choices suspended in a historical eternal present making art that is only a superficial art of surfaces and again you know just go back and look uh we can see that applying
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to this to frank gary's uh design for the weissman art museum there's no truth of architecture being displayed here there is just a play with the surfaces of materials and we can see it in other
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forms of art as well i just want to run down a list of characteristics of postmodernism as it appears in works of art then i want to turn to another visual example and then i want to turn to um turn to an example for poetry and i want to discuss this this idea's relation to multiculturalism so i think there are five basic characteristics of post-modern art the first is pastiche this is a word that it kind of you can see it's a french word but you can see
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like english you know words in it like paste it's a word for a kind of collage that borrows words images tropes or modes of art and combines them in one work of art so post-modern work often takes incongruous elements from different areas of culture and language and throws them together and so you have a work that is radically kind of internally incongruous we're going to see that in i want to read frank o'hara's poem the day lady died as an example of post-modern poetry
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and you'll see that he takes uh words and images from very different domains of culture and puts them in the same poem so this pastiche is a key quality of post-modernist art related to that is a combination of high and low culture so we have to go back to what we talked about
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with culture at the beginning of the class one definition of culture was matthew arnold's the best that has been thought and said that the citizen of the nation should study the best works of art which would be high culture classic works of literature classic works of painting and sculpture and orchestral music and serious philosophy that was the best that has been had been thought and said and other forms of culture were low popular music mass media mass literature
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let's say in the mid 20th century movies radio forms of music like jazz or rock
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forms of media like comic books or paperback popular fiction that was low postmodernism says well if there's no longer any grand narrative to tell us the truth about society with a capital t then there's no longer any way to determine that one form of culture is the best that has been thought and said and any and another form of culture is low is trash is crap we don't need to attend to it the high low culture distinction just goes out the
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window so in postmodern works of art such as o'hara's the day lady died and the painting by andy warhol i'm about to show you uh you have a combination of cultural elements one once seen as divided into high culture myth religion literature classical music serious painting and low culture movies pop music comics etc so a pastiche of disparate elements in one work and a combination of high and low culture because the distinction between high and low culture
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has eroded another thing you see and this is particularly true in fiction and this is what our novel of the postmodern moment uh philip roth the ghost writer is going to be all about is meta fiction meta fiction is when you constantly remind readers that the text is a work of fiction and what does that have to do with post-modernism back to leotard uh all truth claims are to be scrutinized we're to be skeptical of all narratives so now postmodern
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narratives tell us hey i'm just a narrative be skeptical of me i'm gonna remind you that you're just reading a story and you need to be skeptical of the story i'm telling you because you need to be skeptical of all stories so this meta-fictional element comes into play and there are there's also forms of meta poetry meta painting etc all of this leads to what i would call a radical form of irony so traditionally in literature irony is a reversal of meaning or expectation so two
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classic forms of irony in literature are verbal irony where you say one thing and you mean another it's a kind of understatement so we saw that a lot in the martyred where the the tall tone of the book was very understated to um and what that had the effect of doing ironically was communicating just how painful and passionate and emotional the experiences being described were i think that's a
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form of verbal irony another form of verbal irony just in everyday life is sarcasm where you say um
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something and you mean the opposite sure i'm happy to see it but you know you're not happy to see that person but that relies on a stable sense of the truth when you say when you say to someone sure i'm happy to see you for that to work as sarcasm the other person has to know you're not happy to see them for richard e kim's technique of understatement to work we have to know that the understated tone is concealing the truth of the
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volcanic emotions underneath it similarly another form of irony in literature is situational irony when what we expect to happen doesn't happen when our expectations are frustrated and so let's let's look at quicksand we would expect a brilliantly intelligent and accomplished and
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you know culturally cultivated person like helga crane to find success in life and yet she's defeated in her life and so that's a situational irony but that too nella larson is depending on us to realize that that's wrong that helga crane shouldn't be defeated and that the reason she's been defeated is because of the racism and sexism she's been subjected to so that reversal of expectation depends on a stable sense of what should happen for us to feel it as ironic
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so both these forms of irony depend on you knowing what the truth is post-modern irony by contrast leaves us with a sense that there is no truth there's no stable position from which to judge the narrative or to judge any verbal statement because somehow every element of the work is so relativistic that you can't tell what the author thinks of anything um so with traditional irony we're given the opposite of truth which is used to evoke the truth sure i'm happy to see
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you but we know you're not happy and for it to work as irony we have to know you're not happy post-modern irony is it's more like um it's more like uh when when you know when somebody says something and you don't know if they're kidding you don't know if they mean it i don't know if you know anybody like this but there's a certain type of person that sort of says everything with a little kind of smirk and you can never quite tell if it's true or not that's post-modern irony
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i think we're going to see that in the work of visual art i'm going to show you in a moment the final characteristic of post-modernism this one was named in particular by frederick jameson is the waning of affect affect means emotion so as you can tell if the work of art is pasticed together out of disparate elements and if it's constantly reminding you that it is a work of art and if it leaves you no position from which to say what the author's point of view is then it's
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going to be hard to create emotion in a work of art with that with those characteristics so the waning of affect is that artistic styles become cool detached cynical and devoid of strong feeling and i say cynical because if the artist if you can't locate what the artist thinks about anything then there's a kind of cynical rejection of all values you know that's that's a that's a darker way of reading leotard's suspicion of grand narratives it's just a cynical
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you shrug and you say ah whatever everything sucks who cares there's a kind of cynicism to that that quality of post-modern art so everything becomes flat detached and devoid of strong feeling
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so let's look at how this plays out in visual art again i think that's often clearer than literature so we looked at picasso's la demoiselle devin 1907 as our key example of modernist art so i'm going to look at a another visual image by an influential painter of the postmodern era my fellow pittsburgher andy warhol and his screen print marilyn monroe from 1967 so 60 years later we see what's happened and i you know picasso is probably the most important influential
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visual artist of the modernist era in painting i would say warhol is probably the equivalent in uh post-modernism so let's compare these two and contrast these two paintings so they're both paintings of women and they're both paintings of women in a sexualized context so the women in picasso's painting are sex workers in a brothel the woman in warhol's painting is a celebrity who was considered a sex symbol in the mid 20th century so that's the thing they have in common
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i would say everything else is different so first of all i'm i'm too casually using the word painting picasso's work is a painting he stretched a canvas and painted on the canvas warhol's work is not a painting it's a screen print based on a photograph so he took a photograph and he used a printing process that's used for the mass production of images to add color to it so painting is a form of art that stresses the individuality of the painter
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warhol takes a photograph and then puts it through a mass production process as if to say hey i have nothing to do with this all he did was was add the colors in the screen print process so we have a painting stressing the individuality of the artist genius in picasso's case and we have warhol sort of stepping back and saying hey i didn't do anything here i just i'm just participating in our
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general social mass production of images so that's one difference another difference is in picassos we have multiple perspectives incorporated as i talked about at the beginning of the semester we have um the women's sort of uh faces seen in in sort of head on and in profile at the same time but picasso is doing this to stress the individuality uh or the multiplicity of any individual perspective he's walking into this room and he's seeing it from different angles
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and he's giving it to you from all the different angles from which he sees it to try to create a kind of kinetic multiple viewpoint of his own but in any case the view is his the multiple perspectives are all coming from one subjectivity from one psychology in warhol's case there is no view the view is mass societies he took a photograph from a newspaper or a magazine and he ran through the screen printing process this isn't his point of view on marilyn monroe
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because he didn't take the picture his view is simply mass society's view we all have the same view which is that of the mass production of images and so society is made up of nothing other than mass-produced images there is no individual point of view and that's that goes back to that idea that the postmodern self isn't really a self it's just a collection of languages discourses images that circulate in a consumer society
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let's talk about um uh the the sword well i already covered the next one so i'm reading from an index card if you can't tell um so in picasso's view he's created a highly individual form of painting he's given you out of the genius of his painterly labor a new way of seeing which is the multiplicity of views that accompany any individual's perspective so even though it seems multiple because you have multiple perspectives on the same figures it all redounds to the genius
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of the artist picasso is still this great genius who has shown you the truth of how we see things warhol there's no originality in warhol's image and he makes no claims for originality he makes no claims to truth he is he has then here i'm repeating myself he's taken an image out of the circulation of society and just put it back in to circulation he hasn't given you anything of himself now let's talk about so again we talked about sort
35:49
of sexuality in these two images in picasso's image we don't there's nothing in the painting that tells us that this is taking place in a realm in which sexuality is being transacted there's no sort of sign in the painting that's saying this these are sex workers this is a brothel sexuality here just seems to kind of overwhelm any economic discourses
36:17
warhol does just the opposite warhol shows that sexuality in our culture is entirely a media construct sexuality is as culturally constructed as anything else why because the mass circulation of images of beautiful people and we're all made images of men as well as women uh is controlled by the media so sexuality itself is nothing but produced by the replication of signs so uh
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there's also a question of this sort of sexuality of the painter implied in each image picasa
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we know from his biography this was a place he went to you know this was something he saw the sexuality is the painters in warhol's case the sexuality is societies and all he adds and here it's a little bit complicated what he adds is these bright colors that aren't there in the original photograph he exaggerates the kind of brightness of the he he sort of amps up the sexuality of the image by making the the eye shadow and the lipstick and the blonde hair
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sort of he turns all that up to 11. why is he doing that is it to make the image more sexual no i would argue that it's an ironic commentary on the sexuality of the image he dials it up and in this way it is um there was a school of kind of a sub set of post-modernist art called camp c-a-m-p and camp was identified particularly as the sub-cultural style of queer communities in urban america to which andy warhol is a gay artist belonged and what camp did was it took features
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of mass culture and popular culture and kind of exaggerated them for ironic appreciation and so i think we can see warhol now he you know as a gay artist is not painting or making this print out of his sexual desire for marilyn monroe he didn't feel that desire what he's doing is ironically exaggerating the broader cultures sexual desire um and so in that case if we want to apply a feminist critique we might say that picasso is sort of giving us this male heterosexual
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desiring gaze that is kind of subjugating the women in the painting whereas warhol is making an ironic we might say somewhat feminist comment on the production of objectifying images of women he's sort of commenting on how that process happens um and
39:05
so i think that gives gives me brings me to my final point which is that picasso's painting has a kind of seriousness that is on the surface whereas warhol gives you a kind of joking surface but i think warhol the seriousness of it is in the critical edge he's calling into question the grand narrative of heterosexuality in society whereas picasso is giving you the lethally serious vision of his own heterosexual gaze so i hope that seeing these two images side by side and
39:42
thinking about how they exhibit different qualities of modernist and post-modernist art is helpful to you i know it's a very abstract discussion it's hard for me to define post-modernism it's a hard word to define for as much as it gets thrown around but i'm trying to give you as best a sense as i can now let's look at a literary example so one of the poems i asked you to read was frank o'hara's poem the day lady died so frank o'hara belonged to
40:13
a another kind of subset of poets in the 50s and 60s called the new york school of poetry and they were interested in um a casual kind of witty poetry that often referenced the visual arts and that was interested in on the one hand high culture like abstract expressionist painting of the kind we saw with jackson pollock but on the other hand popular culture such as jazz and kind of urban street culture and the new york school was associated with poets like frank o'hara
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and john ashbery who like warhol were gay men and who participated in this kind of campy subcultural this queer style of camp again c-a-m-p i'm borrowing here again i think i quoted her a few lectures ago susan sontag the uh american cultural critic she wrote the sort of essay in 1964 notes on camp that defined this style and this is seen as a major essay also defining kind of post-modern irony because camp the exaggerated appreciation of popular culture and other kinds
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of culture to show kind of the relativity of all culture and appreciation this is a defining sort of post-modern style so frank o'hara just briefly lived from 1926 to 1966 he was born in baltimore i think two irish parents raised in massachusetts and served in world war ii he attended harvard where he met john ashbery the other major new york school poet and started publishing poetry and in
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his most productive years he lived in new york city with his partner and taught at the new school there and became active as both a critic and a curator in the art world and a poet he tragically died quite young um was from being just uh struck by a vehicle as he was hit by a car so that's why he died at such a young age but he produced a very influential body of poetry and this is one of his
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most influential poems i'd like to just read it to you and then to comment on some of the features that both make it a postmodern poem but also i think show us the way in which um postmodernism doesn't apply to every work of art so let's just read it the day lady died it is 12 20 in new york a friday three days after bastille day yes it is 1959 and i go get a shoe shine because i will get off the 419 in east hampton at 7 15 and then go straight to dinner
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and i don't know the people who will feed me i walk up the muddy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly new world writing to see what the poets in ghana are doing these days i go on to the bank and miss stilwa miss stillwagon first name linda i once heard doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the golden griffin i get a little verlande for patsy with drawings by bernard although i do
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think of hisod trans richard lattimore or brendan behan's new play erle balcone or la negra of janae but i don't i stick with verlan after practically going to sleep with quandarinus and for mike i just stroll into the park lane liquor store and ask for a bottle of strega and then i go back where i came from to sixth avenue and the tobacconist and the zigfield theater and casually asked for a carton of galwaz and a carton of pikanes and a new york post with her face on it
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and i am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john doe in the five spot while she whispered a song along the keyboard to mal waldron and everyone and i stopped breathing
44:00
so what is this poem about so the basic idea is that um and again you'd have to this poem needs a footnote to explain it but if you're reading it when it was first published in the 50s you'd know it was about um the day that billy holliday who was a famous jazz singer died and the poet the speaker is going about his day doing the things he does during his day he goes you know he's living
44:29
a very urban the life of an urban artist he wakes up um he goes to get his shoe shine he goes book shopping he's buying some books and some wine for his friends and then he sees and this is a very modern experience you look and the media and you find out that a celebrity has died and the other modern experience is that that celebrity that you didn't know personally means the world to you and
44:59
you legitimately grieve that celebrity this was not something that happened before mass media
45:07
it really wasn't something that could have happened you need a world of newspapers and television and radio to create celebrities to give you news of their personal life that makes you feel like you know them and that is when you grieve when you find out they've died so this is a very kind of modern experience or a postmodern experience if you will because it's related to this mass media environment but look at what the what the way the poem is structured
45:38
this is not the kind of ezra pound ideal of cutting all the revel irrelevancies out of the poem to give you a clear image of the truth that's modernism frank o'hara gives you everything he did that day because he is to a quote leotard or to paraphrase leotard he is interested not in giving you a grand narrative of the truth but just what he's doing you know it's this is meta poetry this is the poet's life this is what the poet does he'll even tell you about his shoe shine
46:12
he'll tell you the timetable of the train he's going to get on he'll tell you uh what he bought for his friends and he puts together different things he says he bought new world writing this is was a kind of avant-garde poetry journal that showed world showcased world literature i bought new world writing to see what the poets in ghana are doing these days so that right there tells you that the literary world is heavily globalized even in the 1950s but he also puts that up against
46:46
his interest in the zigfield theater and buying cigarettes and in the new york post which was a fairly was and still is a fairly trashy tabloid paper so you know the the periodicals mentioned are this avant-garde literary journal and this trashy periodical and he also puts together um he see it a an ancient greek poet in the translation of richmond lattimore and very uh sort of avant-garde drama by jean-janae and french poetry by paul verlon
47:22
and he puts that together with his interest in billy holliday who was a you know a singer of popular music a jazz singer so all of these different cultural elements are put together in this one poem and none of them are weighed more heavily than any other it's all on the continuum of the poet's day so we have that that high low combo and we have that meta quality that meta-fictional or meta-poetic quality of the poet telling you what
47:55
it is to be this poet on this day so in that way this is a very quintessentially post-modern poem however what i want to suggest is that these um characteristics do not fully exhaust any given work of art and so one postmodern characteristic in this poem that is not present is the waning of affect or it is present up until that last stanza so the poem has a kind of jokey ironic breathlessness of the poet telling you about the trivialities of his day and i would say that
48:35
that's not very emotional there's a kind of gentle humor to that like uh this guy's just telling us everything he's gonna do that day like when's he gonna stop is he gonna tell us when he goes in the bathroom or what like there's a kind of gentle comedy to it but then that last stanza hits you and it's meant to hit you as a genuinely emotional moment when he finds out about billy holliday's
48:59
death and i am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john doe in the five spot while she whispered a song along the keyboard to mal waldron and everyone and i stopped breathing
49:13
because her art was so profound that it you know he's he's giving you a a he's giving you a better version of the cliche she took our breath away and the poem ends with that breathlessness of grief and awe before the her art and before the before the loss of her art and in that sense it's not a postmodern poem because the waning of affect gives way to very strong affect in the end and that's why i quoted the critic charles altiri on this slide charles altiri says of this poem
49:50
that it exemplifies how postmodern literature can thrive though oppressed on what the one side by philosophical nihilism so philosophical nihilism is just that belief that there is no truth we can't we can't philosophically establish any truth so that's what oppresses the post-modern artist on the one hand nihilism we can't believe in anything and on the other by the oppressive burden of literary history so the post-modern poet is burdened by the crushing weight of the past
50:23
as signaled by hesiod an ancient greek poet being mentioned in this poem from 1959
50:30
but literature can remain honest and demystified without succumbing to self-pitying nostalgia or refining away its content and the self-conscious acrobatics of what john barth has called the literature of exhaustion let's get rid of all the specific references in there and say this o'hara gives you a postmodern poem just as leotard would ask for one that says there is no grand narrative there is no grand truth but he nevertheless still gives you a poem that possesses
51:08
immense emotional impact by the end so you can have most of the characteristics of post-modernism in art but you can still get to something real and in this poem it's the emotion it's the grief it's the awe it's the gratitude for billie holiday and the sorrow at her death i would say that holds true in warhol's painting too his screen print of marilyn monroe it's not the emotion you get so much but it's what i mentioned earlier which is the critique of the
51:39
commodification and objectification of women in consumer society that is generated by the poem by the paintings ironically extreme um portrayal of this image so no work of post-modern art that i can think of at least in in well i shouldn't i'm being too categorical very few works of post-modern art are 100 post-modern which is to say 100 nihilistic most of them will give you some undercurrent of feeling or will make some claim that something is true or right
52:18
it's very hard to make a work of art that doesn't do that so you don't get the pure nihilism of postmodernism that altiri claims is here in most works of art and that brings me to the final topic i'd like to cover to today today before getting to a couple more poems in the next lecture i want to talk about what the relationship of post-modernism is to multiculturalism and i think there's three possible relations i've abbreviated them pm for post-modernism mc for multiculturalism
52:54
i think in one reading post-modernism and multiculturalism are the same thing post-modernism calls all grand narratives and all dominant normative master narratives into question and so that just naturally leads to multiculturalism it says that
53:15
if you can't say that any any one culture holds the truth then you necessarily recognize the plurality of cultures each in its own full legitimacy all truth claims should be considered equal all cultural practices should be considered equal if cultures were once judged let's say back in the 19th century or early 20th century
53:39
european cultures in the era of imperialism said well europe's culture is superior to non-european cultures for these five reasons well post-modernism says no uh you know we've called all of those hierarchical values and grand narratives into question and so you can't say that any one culture is better than any other post-modernism and multiculturalism express the same underlying cultural movement which is one toward pluralism and relativism however
54:10
there's also an argument you could make that postmodernism is even sort of superior to uh multiculturalism because if we say that we can't say that one culture is better than another you're still talking about singular cultures you're still saying okay we have let's say european cultures here asian cultures here african cultures here i'm speaking in the broadest possible terms but you're still saying there's some way you can define these things and you could define it more
54:42
narrowly french culture japanese culture white american culture african american culture jewish american culture asian american culture but if we're speaking in these terms we're still saying that cultures exist and have a kind of singular kind of essence underlying them that allows us to speak of them as such but remember postmodernism calls all claims to truth narrative coherence into
55:13
question under postmodernism any unified culture is just a collection of disparate elements and so can be to use a very postmodern word deconstructed into these disparate elements similarly um okay so european culture says it's superior to these other cultures and post-modernism calls that into question but any individual culture if it is a culture makes certain claims about the way things should be any individual culture makes claims about a narrative it's shared throughout
55:50
its history and about the way that it should be organized again think of langston hughes as the negro speaks of rivers which gives you this kind of triumphant reclamation of the history of the cultures of the african diaspora well post-modernism might say well just as you you can't allow european culture to make any special claims for its unity coherence or truth you can't allow the cultures of the african diaspora to make those claims either where everything
56:22
gets deconstructed all every bit of it and in so far as post-modernism as we'll see accompanies
56:31
movements like feminism and gay liberationism then you might say well all cultures have sort of oppressive aspects toward women or towards forms of sexuality it considers non-normative and they need to be deconstructed too that ethical claim that leotard gives us that we need to call all the received wisdom of any grand narrative into question goes across the board and then finally though you could make the counter claim that multiculturalism
57:02
is in fact superior to post-modernism because when post-modernism questions all master narratives all claims to truth and all received values then it doesn't give you any reason to say that it's wrong to oppress people and i would say that underlying multiculturalism is an ethical claim of its own which is that non-european and non-white cultures have been pretty severely oppressed in the main just to speak in generalities and multiculturalism by bringing these cultures
57:37
to the fore is a form of ethical redress for that prior oppression but if post-modernism calls all values into question doesn't it call all moral values into question doesn't it say isn't there a contradiction in postmodernism by the way if all values are called into question then where does this ethical imperative to deconstruct all norms and grand narratives come from if you've called everything into question you've called everything into question nothing matters nothing
58:07
means anything so in that case multiculturalism uh doesn't mean anything either and who you know it doesn't matter if you were oppressed because uh oppression itself is a moral category and we've called all moral categories into question so in that case isn't post-modernism from the point of view of multiculturalism dangerous doesn't it lead to a political and moral anarchy that fails to challenge oppression as multiculturalism was meant to do
58:36
now we can't answer that today we can't really say today how that's going to play itself out
58:44
different writers we're going to read in this course are going to take different positions and we just have to see what those are but i wanted to lay out the basic possibilities postmodernism is equal to multiculturalism because each are examples of a move toward pluralism post-modernism is better than multiculturalism because it deconstructs the possibly oppressively normative cultures of which multiculturalism is made up or post-modernism is inferior to multiculturalism
59:14
because by calling everything into question it leaves no room to say why we should even champion multiculturalism why oppression is bad um my illustration on this slide on the left left side and here i'll end is the poem by dudley randall i asked you to read called a different image and i think i i put this poem here to exemplify the uh the possibilities that post-modernism and multiculturalism could work together because i think we're going to see examples as we go on and
59:47
the semester of the post-modernism is better than multiculturalism option and the post-modernism is worse than multiculturalism option i wanted to give you a clear example of a poem in which these are shown to work together so the poem is called a different image it's very short i'll read it to you the age requires this task create a different image reanimate the mask shatter the icons of slavery and fear replace the lear of the minstrel's burnt cork face
1:00:21
with a proud serene and classic bronze of benin so the context for this poem deadly randall is an african-american poet and he is saying that what african-americans need to do
1:00:36
to escape their oppression is to replace the degrading images of african americans that circulate in culture which are images of slavery and images of the mocking racist minstrel show replace those with a different image and make that circulate in culture and he proposes the sculptures of the uh of benin which is an african civilization they're bronze sculptures because that's a beautiful and proud and noble image so replace the degrading
1:01:15
image that has accompanied the oppression of african americans with a noble and proud image what strikes me about this poem though is he does not say uh the previous images were lies and the new image is the truth the icons of slavery and fear and the lear of the minstrel's burnt cork face those are false the proud serene and classic bronze of benin is true nowhere in the poem does he make that claim maybe underlying the logic of the poem is that claim
1:01:53
but he doesn't make it he says let's replace one set of images that have
1:02:00
been bad for us with another image that can be good for us and i think that's an example of multiculturalism and post-modernism working together he admits that any given society at any given time is made up of the circulation of images no one of which can claim to be true and he says so given that postmodern reality the multicultural imperative for african americans should be to put into circulation positive images and positive representations of themselves rather
1:02:36
than negative ones so positive representations and negative representations not true representations and false representations this poem accepts the logic of post-modernism for multiculturalism what we want to see next is how that works out in other poets particularly of the 1950s and 60s so i want to briefly look in the next lecture at poems by lawrence ferlingetti amiri baraka and adrian rich
1:03:08
and that's how i want to begin the next lecture i want to see how they weigh in on this question and what that what this all you know some of the further implications of these ideas for art and for politics and for race and for gender and for sexuality and then we'll get to our uh our first novel the ghost writer so until then thanks very much for your attention and have a great day
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