English 215: American Writers
Muhlenberg College, Spring 2001
MW 3:00-4:15

Instructor:Dr. Stephen doCarmo
Office: Center for the Arts, room 276
Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday 1:00-2:00
E-mail: snd3@lehigh.edu

Required Texts
Hemingway, Ernest.  The Sun Also Rises.
Percy, Walker.  The Moviegoer.
Walker, Alice.  The Color Purple.
Pynchon, Thomas.  The Crying of Lot 49.

All of the above are available for you in the Muhlenberg College bookstore.  I've also prepared for you, though, a required packet of photocopied readings available in the English Department office in the Center for the Arts.  It will cost you several dollars.

Course Description
In this course we'll be discussing, writing about, and reading works representative of four different movements in twentieth-century American literature.  We'll address these movements one at a time -- thus the course will have four units, each anchored by a different American novel but also including supplemental readings (those from the photocopy packet mentioned above) meant to further illuminate trends and tendencies from the movements we're considering.

The first movement we'll discuss is modernism, which was at its peak in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s; we'll be reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), along with poems by T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and a short story by Flannery O'Connor to help us understand what it was all about.  Next we'll discuss the existentialist-influenced literature of the 1950s, using Walker Percy's 1959 novel The Moviegoer as a touchstone but reading poems and/or stories by Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Allen Ginsberg, too.  Third, we'll consider literature from the cultural-political movements of the 1960s, '70s, and after.  Works by politically minded women and African-Americans will be especially emphasized as we supplement Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner The Color Purple with texts by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amiri Baraka.  Lastly, we'll consider postmodernism in literature, examining several different sub-trends within that movement.  We'll look first at a classic work of black humor -- Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1967).  Then we'll move on to a terrific example of metafiction with John Barth's story "Lost in the Funhouse," and we'll sample "image fiction," as some critics call it, with David Foster Wallace's story "Lyndon."

You'll observe, too, as you look at the course schedule below, that I've nixed one class meeting in each unit so that we can spend that time watching a film together.  I'll let you know before those dates what films we'll be watching, along with when and wear, but count on their being recent films meant to illustrate the impact each of our four literary movements have had on the American popular imagination.

The ability to recognize and describe each of the movements named above is what I'm tempted to call the "shallow" knowledge you'll get from this course.  There are two bits of "deep" knowledge I hope you'll take from it too, though.  The first is that literature, like all art, does not deal in eternal, universal Human Truths; rather, its ideas about truth, reality, and human nature change -- sometimes radically -- as history progresses and the culture that produces it evolves.  The second "deep" thing I hope you'll realize is that no matter what professions each of us may go on to pursue, we can only become better American citizens -- scholcky as that may sound -- by taking time to study historical developments in our culture's art.  Why?  Because that art is indicative of the issues that preoccupy us as a nation -- issues we need to have some solid understanding of before we can consider ourselves educated and socially conscientious people.

Requirements
1)  You must keep a reading journal, which will account for 40% of your final grade.  Each time you come to class on a day a reading assignment is due, you should bring along a typed, double-spaced  journal entry on the reading you've done for that day.  Each entry should be roughly 200 to 250 words long (i.e. the better part of a double-spaced page) and should address, above all else, this question: What one big philosophical idea is this author trying sell me on, and where in the text is that idea coming across especially clearly?

That's actually two related questions, I guess -- and as you answer the second one, you should directly quote the text you're writing about.  Don't quote it too exorbitantly, so you spend all your time copying somebody else's words rather than developing your own ideas.  But at some point in each journal you should reproduce (and put quote marks around) some sentence or passage in which you think the author's central idea is coming across particularly loudly.

Though they must be typed, I'll think of journal entries as relatively informal writings.  This doesn't mean they can be sloppy or insensible; it just means I won't flip out or penalize you if there are a few spelling or comma errors, or if your train of thought shifts a little more abruptly at times than would be permissible in a "polished" piece of writing.

I'll collect daily journal entries on an unannounced basis some nine or ten times over the course of the semester.  Once I've taken up a journal entry, I'll put some comments on it and give it a grade of between one and five, five being good (the equivalent of an "A") and one being lousy (the same as an "F").  At the end of the semester I'll drop your lowest journal grade and average all the others.

2)  You'll have a mid-term and a final, the former worth 13% of your final grade, the latter 17%.  Both will be taken in class, and both will require you to identify and explain the signficance of passages reproduced from the books we've read.  The exams may also ask you to explain the significance of some of our novels' lesser characters or to say a little about the historical moment at which each book was produced.  I'll tell you more about what to expect on these exams before you take them.

The final exam will be non-cumulative, though you may choose to allude in it to books read in the first half of the semester.

I'll grade both of these exams on an A to F scale, with "plus" and "minus" gradations possible.

3)  You'll need to write a five-page polished essay that will be worth 20% of your final grade.  In it, you'll have to compare and contrast the philosophies, viewpoints, and/or opinions of several of the authors we're reading, telling me which of those authors' ideas seem more applicable to or useful in the America you live in today and why you think so.

Your essay should have a clear thesis.  It should be well organized, and transitions between its ideas should be readily followable.  Your essay should have ample support for its claims, in the form of both quotes from the texts it examines and stories about things you've seen or experienced in your own life.  It should be well proofread, with very few spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors.

I'll happily give constructive criticism to anyone who'd like to conference with me on a draft of his or her essay.  Please bear in mind, though, that my criticism won't be meant to "fix" your paper so it definitely gets an "A."  It'll be meant only to help you improve whatever you bring me.

You can turn in your essay at any point between the day you take your midterm exam and Monday, May 7th (that's five days after our last day of class).  Once you've given it to me, I'll grade your essay on an A to F scale, with "plus" and "minus" gradations possible.  We'll talk more about your essay and what's expected of you in it in the first half of the course.

4)  You'll need to actively participate in class activities and discussions, since participation will count for 10% of your final grade.  Come to each and every class meeting.  Do in-class freewrites when I ask you to.  Work hard in your in groups when I break you up into them.  Share your ideas and questions with me and the rest of your classmates regularly during class discussions.  Do all these things, and I'll happily give you an "A" for participation at the end of the semester.

Please know that attendance -- including punctuality -- will be a major influence on your participation grade.   Missing more than three classes for any reason will guarantee your getting less than an "A" for this 10% of your final grade in the couse.

So that's it.  But here, again, is your final grade distribution:
                                   Reading Journal...........................40%
                                   Midterm...........................................13%
                                   Final.................................................17%
                                   Polished Essay.............................20%
                                   Participation...................................10%
                                                                                                            100%

Late Work
The only thing that could become late, really, is your reading journal entries, and I'll accept them at a one-number-grade-per-class-period penalty.  That's to say that turning in on a Wednesday a journal entry you should have turned in the Monday before will result in its getting a "3" instead of the "4" it may have gotten had it been on time.

Special Accomodations
Such accomodations as extended time on exams will naturally be given to anyone with a documented learning problem.  If you have such needs, please talk to me about them soon.

Course Schedule
Note: "PC" refers to your photocopy packet.

Wednesday January 17: Introduction to the course.  Questions about the syllabus.  I'll probably ask you to do a bit of freewriting in class that I'll collect but won't in any way grade.

Monday January 22: Discussion of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, through page 47.
Wednesday January 24: Discussion of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, pages 48-95.

Monday January 29: Discussion of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, pages 96-208.
Wednesday January 31: Discussion of the remainder of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

Monday February 5: Discussion of Eliot's "The Hollow Men," Marianne Moore's "Poetry," and Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," on pages 15, 18, and 20 of your PC, respectively.
Wednesday February 7: Class nixed so we can watch Ang Lee's film The Ice Storm together on this night.  I'll give you more  information on where and when before this date.

Monday February 12: Discussion of our film and of Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which begins on page 1 of your PC.
Wednesday February 14: Discussion of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, through page
47.

Monday February 19: Discussion of Percy's The Moviegoer, through page 136.
Wednesday February 21: Discussion of Percy's The Moviegoer, through page 184.

Monday February 26: Discussion of the remainder of Percy's The Moviegoer.
Wednesday February 28: Discussion of Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," and Allen Ginsberg's "America," starting on pages 55, 58, and 62 of your PC, respectively.

Monday March 12: Class nixed so we can watch Vincent Gallo's film Buffalo '66 together on this night.  I'll give you more  information on where and when before this date.
Wednesday March 14: Discussion of our film and of Norman Mailer's "The Man Who Studied Yoga," in your PC.  We'll also do a little reviewing for your midterm exam.

Monday March 19: Midterm exam.
Wednesday March 21: Discussion of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, pages 1-60.

Monday March 26: Discussion of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, pages 61-160.
Wednesday March 28: Discussion of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, pages 161-211.

Monday April 2: Discussion of the remainder of Walker's The Color Purple.
Wednesday April 4: Discussion of Amiri Baraka's "Black Art" and Dutchman, beginning on pages 89 and 91 of your PC, respectively.

Monday April 9: Class nixed so we can watch Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove together on this night.  I'll give you more  information about when and where before this date.
Wednesday April 11: Discussion of Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," of Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" (they begin on pages 66 and 77 of your PC, respectively), and of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which will launch us into our "postmodernism" unit.

Wednesday April 18: Discussion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, through page 30.

Monday April 23: Discussion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, pages 31-79.
Wednesday April 25: Discussion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, pages 80-119.

Monday April 30: Discussion of the remainder of The Crying of Lot 49.
Wednesday May 2: Discussion of David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon," which starts on page 122 of your PC.

I'll offer a review session for the final exam sometime before the day you take it.  I'll give you more information about it before the end of the semester.

Also, don't forget that your essay is due by Monday, May 7th.  I'll give you more information before that date about where you can drop it off, in case you haven't given it to me before then.
 

Some Notes on MODERNISM

The modernist movement in the arts (biggest in American literature in the 1920s and ’30s) probably grows out of three “feelings” common among artists at the time:

The modernist movement in the arts, then, growing out of the above “feelings,” spawns art that often shows the following characteristics:

1) It’s formally radical, or “avante garde,” so much so that it often shocked audiences of the time.  The wildly fragmented feel of much modernist art is intended to make readers/viewers/listeners realize they’re living in a wildly fragmented modern world.

2) Modernist art often tries very hard to be “objective”—that is, it tries to show us things as they really, absolutely are.  If modern people are losing their sense of reality because they’re surrounded by too much information and too many images, modernism tries to give reality back to them.  It does this (in literature) by getting rid of plot and story, which are artificial and contrived, and by taking up instead “stream of consciousness” techniques that more accurately (modernist artists think) show the way the mind really works.  Modernist art is also often emotionally chilly, since sentimentality of any sort gets in the way of real truth, real understanding.  And being deeply ironic is another means of being objective, since when characters are saying or thinking one thing but the author intends us to understand another, it creates more “objective” distance between the artist and the world s/he depicts.

3) Modernist art also often shows a fascination with primitivism, or with ancient mythology.  If modernist artists think we’re being alienated from our humanity by too much technology and rationality, one way they can return us to our lost humanity is by going back in history to “primitive” or mythological themes—stuff from a time when the world was simpler and people seemed more human.

4) Modernist art often features “outsider” figures—characters who emblematize modern human alienation through their own isolation and distance (physical or psychological) from others.

5) Lastly, modernist art often demonstrates a feeling that individuals must become gods.  If God is dead, done in by the likes of Darwin and Einstein and by horrible catastrophes like WWI, then the individual must become a “superman” who can create meaning where there seems to be none—or who can at least stand there and keep a stiff upper lip while the world inevitably tears him down.
 

Some Notes on EXISTENTIALIST-INFLUENCED REALISM

Realism first got big in American fiction in the second half of the 19th century; Mark Twain, many critics say, was its first great practitioner.  It stayed big through the mid 1920s or so; then (though this is simplifying things a bit) the avante garde experimentalism of the modernists stole the spotlight for a while; then realism got big again after WW II.

As a style of fiction, realism has a few big hallmarks: 1) it’s usually plot-driven (even if subtly); 2) it’s usually concerned with “ordinary” people and the details of ordinary life; 3) it usually tries for “psychological depth” — that is, it spends a lot of time exploring the minds and thought processes of its characters; and 4) it generally uses “transparent” language — the sort that doesn’t draw attention to itself but rather (if it's working right) just lets the reader see right through it to the world it’s representing.

(Bear in mind it’s not called realism because it’s the most realistic way, necessarily, of representing the world in fiction: modernists were convinced their plotless, fragmented, “stream of consciousness” fictions were the most accurate way to show reality, and many believed it.  Though Mark Twain’s stories might have seemed particularly “realistic” when they were first written, and so were given that label, “realism” for us at this point is basically just a conventional label given to fiction with the qualities I’ve listed above.)

SO…a lot of fiction of the late ‘40s and ‘50s is not only realistic but “existentialist.”  Existentialism is a European philosophy advanced most famously by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and it was at its height in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s.  It has a few big, central beliefs: 1) that the absurdity and inhumanity of the Godless modern world must be combated by brave, non-conformist individuals; 2) that “existence precedes essence” (that is, you’re born with no God-given soul or human “essence,” so it’s your job to create it for yourself as you go through life); and 3) though alienation from society may be painful, the brave, non-conformist individual who is the existentialist hero will preserve his or her alienation as an emblem of his or her separateness and independence.

Despite the fact that existentialists are almost by definition atheists (it’s your job to forge an “essence” for yourself, they’d say, precisely because no almighty power is going to hand one over to you), their writings often take on an almost religious tone or sensibility.  Why?  Because existentialism is basically a secular religion, if that’s not too completely oxymoronic.  They may say you have to create your own essence, but existentialists still believe in essences; thus the heroic characters in their books who conduct searches for Meaning, Insight, and Transcendence (or who go looking for their own essences, basically) are on a mission no less religious for being human-centered rather than God-centered.

Existentialism got big with American writers after WW II for a couple key reasons.  The first is that fiction writers, like a lot of American intellectuals, had had it with big, state-level politics.  Before WW II, many intellectuals were “lefties” who’d placed great faith in communism and socialism as potential saviors of humanity.  During WW II, though, it became clear that plenty was rotten in Russia, the place many intellectuals had looked to as a shining example of communism in practice.  Stalin, Russia’s leader, had not only made dirty deals with Hitler to keep him out of Russia, but he was also, out of his own paranoia, imprisoning and murdering officials in his own government at an alarming rate.  His clear new status as a dictator made lots of American intellectuals lose faith in any type of national-level governmental politics and made them look to individuals as agents of change instead.

The other reason American writers take to existentialism after WW II: the “monoculture” is gaining ground in the States.  Everyone’s living in the same type of houses, watching the same TV shows, driving the same cars, working the same types of bureaucratic jobs....   Some bold existentialist individuality is clearly in order.

One other thing worth noting: much of the most famous existentialist realism of the ‘50s comes from Jewish-American writers (Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud) whose novels feature a character type literary critics have come to call the schlemiehl (“fool” in Yiddish).  He (occasionally she) is a character unafraid to express emotion, be introspective, and be “different” from the regimented masses.  This character, according to a critic named Ruth Wisse, “declares his humanity by loving and suffering in defiance of the forces of depersonalization and the ethic of enlightened stoicism.”   In other words, s/he’s all about being self-expressive in a world that demands that you shut up and join.
 

Some notes on the BLACK CULTURAL MOVEMENT

You could also call it the black aesthetics movement, or the black arts movement….  Basically, though, the black cultural movement, as we’re calling it, was at its height in the latter half of the 1960’s and into the 1970s, though echoes of it are definitely still around today: just listen to Public Enemy’s music or watch Spike Lee’s movies.  If the movement had a single central purpose, it was to make African Americans (and, indeed, black people the world over) totally and irreversibly proud of their racial and cultural heritage: one of the most commonly recited mantras of African-American activists in the late '60s and 1970s was "black is beautiful" -- an idea many black American people had never really had the chance to explore in previous decades.

Complicating things a bit, there are a few big beliefs central to the black cultural movement.  The first is that art and politics are inseparable – that great art is born from political strife and can actually be an important tool for raising consciousness about the social problems oppressed people deal with.  This isn’t a particularly original idea in the late 1960’s; writers like Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair had believed way back at the start of the twentieth century that art could help bring about a socialist workers’ revolution, and their own novels (e.g. The Octopus and The Jungle) had tried, however unsuccessfully, to make that revolution happen.  In the 1960’s, though, black writers bring this idea of the marriage of art to political change roaring back again – and probably to greater effect than those older socialists ever had.

A second idea big in the black cultural movement pertains to “black nationalism,” as it came to be known – a doctrine holding that if, in fact, black people have only generally suffered because of their exposure to white society, they should perhaps form a separate society having as a little as possible to do with whites.  This belief, which was powerfully expressed in the politics of the Black Panthers and the sermons of Malcolm X (the earlier Malcolm X, at least), ran wildly contrary to the  “integrationist” agenda of many American Civil Rights supporters and was descended from the ideas of Marcus Garvey, an African American who suggested in the 1920s that African-Americans move to Africa to found a new black-only nation.  In any event, many artworks by black Americans in the 1960’s  deal in some way with this notion that separatism is preferable to integration – that black people will be better off if they avoid the dominant white culture and rid their “colonized” minds of the myths and standards white society has poisoned them with.

A third key belief is that there is something fundamentally, identifiably black about black people’s art and culture, even if that “something” is often hard to name or pin down.  If European-descended culture often seems sort of repressed and moralistic,  then African-descended culture is more sensual, or even sexual (“funky,” Toni Morrison would say); it may also seem less judgmental and more tolerant of differences.  If European-derived art is shaped by restrictions of form and propriety, made into definitive, finalized “texts,” then African-derived art is looser, freer, more improvisational, and closer to an “oral” tradition that never totally fixes or finalizes artwork.  (You could think, maybe, of the difference between "classical" music and jazz.)  If this is true – if there is something different about black perception, black art, black culture, black language – then only black forms of music, language, dance, painting, etc., are capable of expressing black experience.  It is only fitting, then, many black artists of this movement said, that black artists use black forms of art and language in their works, no matter how improper or “unacceptable” a white art establishment might say they are.
 

Some Notes Relevant to WOMEN’S FICTION
AFTER 1970

Let me tell you about a few fundamental beliefs of the feminist movement of the 1970s  – beliefs many feminist thinkers still hold today, and whose influence is writ large on the work of lots of female (and sometimes male) artists and writers after 1970 or so.

The most fundamental claim of the feminist movement, maybe, has been that modern Western societies (including our American one) are essentially patriarchal in nature; that is, they’ve been designed by men (as opposed to women – that’s not an all-inclusive word meaning “humankind”) to serve male interests.  Up until quite recently, after all, women have been unable to vote, own property,  have reproductive
rights, divorce abusive spouses, hold office, go to prestigious universities….  They have, in short, been treated as property – or as domestic slave labor, many feminists would say.  And though we have, in the twentieth century, done away with many of the institutional and legal injustices women used to face (women can now vote, hold office, own property, etc.), many feminists say there may still be a cultural bias against girls and women in our society: they’re often expected to be pretty, quiet, small, respectful, nurturing – all qualities that can prevent them from enjoying the fruits of their many legal victories they’ve won in recent decades.

This leads us to a second important feminist precept: that the personal is political.  By the 1970s, feminists had won a great many battles, as mentioned above, in the courts – yet many women were still being oppressed in an arena that legislation couldn’t hope to reach: the arena of personal life.  At home, women were still expected (even if not legally obliged) to clean the house, raise the children, cook the meals.  In schools, girls were still expected to be pretty and quiet and to “choose” home economics classes over, say, physics classes.  In romantic relationships,
women were still expected to defer to men, to be couth and not too desirous of sex.  This all led feminists to realize that people’s day-to-day lives are political, and that kitchens and classrooms and even bedrooms are real political fronts -- that is, places where power relationships are forged and negotiated, even though the law can’t hope to control what goes on in those places.  More radical feminists of the last thirty years have suggested that only an essentially separate women's culture, with its own art, its own social and cultural institutions, and even its own language, will ever really end the cultural prejudices against women they see continuing to this day.

A corollary of the above idea about the personal being political is that equally important notion that “macro“ (or large) political systems can’t be but so important in the fight for gender equality. The Democratic party versus the Republican one; liberal social policy versus conservative; courts versus legislatures….  This is all very nice, and great gains have been made in the courts, and by enacting new laws like the ones that gave women suffrage and the right to safe abortions.  A really smart feminist knows, though, that macro-politics are only half the battle: a micro-politics capable of grasping the significance of interpersonal relationships – of what goes on between individual men and women in individual homes and workplaces – is equally necessary.

One more big idea: many feminists during (and after) the ‘70s asserted the need to rescue women’s history  -- a history of women thinkers and innovators and artists and victims and heroes whose stories were often pushed aside by male institutions that often chose not to value them.  Feminist historians and artists and scholars suddenly became interested in finding their forgotten predecessors, and as they “rescued”
those forgotten women from obscurity, their works and stories did, in fact, become part of the curriculum now taught in schools.   Zora Neale Hurston – a black female writer of the 1930s and ‘40s many of you are likely to encounter in college – is now a towering figure in American literature, though she was all but totally forgotten before the 1970s.  Same goes for Kate Chopin, whose turn-of-the-century novel The
Awakening has become a classic after being rescued from obscurity.  Lots of feminist artists have been similarly interested in rescuing the stories of women (or types of women) either forgotten or, maybe, misunderstood in the past : a film called Elizabeth from a couple years ago might be a good example – and maybe you’ve read one or two books in this course that have a similar project…?
 

Some Notes on POSTMODERNIST BLACK HUMOR

Before we get to the “black humor” part, let me tell you about the “postmodernist”
part.

Postmodernism is a diverse, complex movement in philosophy and the arts
(everything from literature and film to architecture, painting, and music) that starts becoming discernible around 1960, give or take a few years.  Like I said, it’s complicated, and it means different things to different thinkers in different fields, but for our purposes at this moment, I want to define postmodernism the same way a French philosopher named Jean Francois Lyotard does: as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

A “metanarrative,” for Lyotard, is any theory that might explain (or try to explain) just about anything that happens in the world.  And if you’re “incredulous” toward metanarratives, as postmodernists are, it means you’re doubtful of them – that you disbelieve them.

There have been a few important metanarratives in modern times.  One is Marxism, which tries to explain absolutely everything in terms of economics and class struggle.  Another is psychoanalysis, the type of thinking Freud initiated, which says human nature and (hence) all human affairs are understandable in terms of people’s internal psychological mechanisms.  A third metanarrative might be that of rational science in general, which believes all phenomena can be classified and objectively understood through close empirical study.

All metanarratives, you might be able to see by now, are eminently rational: they believe everything that happens can be explained rationally, according to the dictums of some theory.   Postmodernists, then, being “incredulous” toward metanarratives, are essentially anti-rational.  Why?  Because for (many) postmodernist artists and philosophers, rationality, logic, and scientism are bad things, despite the faith most modern people have placed in them.  They’re bad because such systems’ belief that everything in the world can be mastered, understood, defined, categorized, and explained are inevitably too reductive, and can even potentially get people hurt.  For a postmodernist, all rationality carries within it the germ of fascism; that is, it can become a way to control people.

There are, then, a few traditional "western" beliefs, born from various metanarratives, that postmodernists want us to be done with: 1) the belief in a coherent, stable subject, or “self,” along with all the systems of thinking (like psychoanalysis) that have claimed to understand what makes a “self” tick; 2) the belief in teleological history – that is, any perspective (like Marxism) claiming that history is moving in some pre-ordained direction, or that all events can be understood as part of some causal chain of events; and 3) the belief that science – any type of science – can be an instrument for mastering reality and making everything explicable and tame.  All these beliefs, postmodernists would say, can become dangerous: they can be used to control people, or to make them adhere to some artificially constructed “norm.”

A classic example: two French psychoanalysts named Deleuze and Guattari wrote a famous book in the late 1960s called Anti-Oedipus, in which they blasted
psychoanalysis, weirdly enough, as an instrument of control that doctors and
professionals use to make people conform to rules of proper modern society.  In
psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex (having to do with sexual urges a child feels for his or her parents) is supposed to be the foundation for almost everything human beings go through.  Deleuze and Guattari, however, say the Oedipus complex is a basically a fiction that Freud and his followers have inflicted on the world with the attitude “you’ll say mommy-daddy-me when I tell you to” (their words).  The Oedipus complex, Deleuze & Guattari say, is a fake norm that’s been used to socialize and control countless people the world over – and to proclaim “sick” anyone who doesn’t play by its weird rules.

Deleuze and Guattari are philosophers, loosely speaking.  Artists have done lots to advance postmodernism, too, though.  There’s been anti-rational painting (Andy Warhol), anti-rational music (John Cage), anti-rational theatre (Sam Shepard), and anti-rational architecture (Robert Venturi), all of it meant to help people bust out of the boxes that organized, controlled, “logical” thinking forces us into.

There’s been anti-rational literature, too – and that’s where black humor comes in.  Black humor is the first wave of postmodernist literature, and it kicks into gear in the late ‘50s and stays big right through the 1960s.  The main thing black humor does is lampoon / mock / make comedy out of all sorts of systems of rationality.   In doing so, it often demonstrates another tendency many readers, maybe too simplistically, take to be its central feature: it finds comedy in “inappropriate” subject matter.  It’s that first thing it does, though, of course, that makes the black humor of the ‘50s and ‘60s particularly “postmodernist.”

Why should black humor get big at the point in American history when it does?  A few reasons, maybe.

1) American culture in the ‘50s and ‘60s is getting super-systematized and regulative.  People’s lives seem increasingly pre-planned, pre-packaged, pre-fabricated.  School, work, retirement.  Office, home, shopping mall.  All this organization is starting to look a little nutty, a little scary, a little too controlling.

2) The cold war is in full swing, and it’s the very emblem of both rationality (as long as both our country and theirs have a hundred times more nuclear weapons than are required to kill every life form on the planet, we’ll all be safe) and total insanity.  It’s rationality that truly stands to turn utterly deadly – and almost does in 1960 with the Cuban missile crisis.

3) The supposedly "oppositional" existentialism of the ‘40s and early ‘50s has turned into a kind of glib, dumb cottage industry.  Psychologists are selling take-charge-of-your-life self-help books to the masses; Hollywood is pumping out “non-conformist” James Dean and Marlon Brando flicks for teenagers….  The existentialism that had seemed so hip and oppositional for a while has become just one more thing that’s been systematized, co-opted, and caged in by the “rational” mainstream.  Something else will have to step up to be “oppositional” – and that something else winds up being black humor, which lambasts the rationality that seems to have swallowed up existentialism whole.
 

Some Notes on POSTMODERNIST METAFICTION

Postmodernist metafiction is a style of writing that first got big in the late 1960s and saw its peak, probably, in the '70s, though many writers (Robert Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace) have kept dabbling in it and showing signs of its influence well into the '80s and '90s.  Most of its practitioners have been "academic" writers – that is, writers who get read mainly by English and philosophy professors and often have university teaching jobs themselves.  Interestingly, metafictional techniques have "leaked out" into stuff like pop music, TV, and film way more often than into popular literature: you're more likely to find "meta-" techniques in an episode of The Simpsons or in songs by Beck or Lauren Hill than in a book by Stephen King or Michael Crichton.

Before we worry about why it's "postmodernist," let me define "metafiction" for you.  And it's easy: a metafiction is any work of fiction that takes either itself or some other story (or group of stories) as its primary subject.

So that's that.  But why is this "postmodernist"?  That's a little trickier.

When we were reading John Barth, I told you postmodernism (a trend in philosophy and the arts, for our purposes) is all about anti-rationality.  That's still true here.  One of the main staples of Western rationality, I want to suggest, has always been a "hermeneutics of representation," to use an over-complicated but fun term.  Hermeneutics is just a grotesque word meaning "the art or science of nterpretation."  And representation, not surprisingly, is simply the practice of substituting one thing for another.

According to the rules and precepts of rationality, a word or an image can "represent" a real thing -- thus when you read the word "cat," you know it's just "standing in" for, or representing, an actual four-legged animal.  Same if you see a photo of a cat.  You interpret the word or image as being the equivalent of the animal, or as being its "representative"; thus you're practicing, without even knowing it, a "hermeneutics of representation."

The word cat, or the picture of the cat, we can say, is a signifier: it signifies, or stands in for, the real cat.  And the real cat, then, is the signified, or the thing that's being represented.  While this all seems really simple and common-sensical, maybe, the fact is that vast and important cultural institutions -- Science and the Law, to name just a couple -- couldn't do their eminently rational work if we didn't let them believe that signifiers can stand in for signifieds.

Here's the thing, then: postmodernists (like Robert Coover) suggest that there is no "signified" out there; that is, they think there's no "real" thing to which our signifiers point.  The maybe liberating, maybe scary fact is that signifiers only ever spawn other signifiers: they never actually get us close to -- much less "stand in" for -- anything real.  You might believe there's a furry four-legged animal (general or specific) to which the word "cat" simply points, but in expressing this belief all you're doing is using words like "real," "furry," "four-legged," and "animal."  Just more signifers.  The "real" thing remains elusive and completely unpossessable.

And there's your anti-rationality.  Rationality can't go on -- can't operate or get anything done -- if there's no "reality" for it to govern and study.

Of course anybody could've said this at any point in history.  So why do a lot of artists and philosophers start getting hung up on these ideas late in the 20th century?  Because we're living at a time in history, they might say, when there are so many signfiers surrounding us -- words and images of every sort -- that the fact of their being in charge and reality having been totally eclipsed by them is now unignorable.  A for-instance: even if you're not famous, as a contemporary person, there are still way, way more representations of you in the world than there is real you.  There are hundreds of photos of you; you're probably on videotape somewhere; you've put God knows how many signatures out there in the world, all of them "standing in" for you....  And even when you get to your "real" person, you'll find it's wearing clothes advertised in mail-order catalogues, that it's speaking a language that pre-existed it, that it switches pre-existing languages depending on where it is and who it's talking
to....  It gets very hard to say where, precisely, the real you is.  You may begin to seem like just another big tangle of signifiers.

This is all to say that signifiers, in the contemporary world, have become so abundant, have gotten so out of control, that they've made the idea of a "real" reality down underneath them kind of laughable.  They're now running the show.

So what influence do these ideas have on artists?  Lots of them go "meta-."  They start writing songs about songs (Beck), painting pictures about pictures (Andy Warhol), and writing stories about stories (John Barth).  You also see movies and TV shows that very self-consciously quote other movies and TV shows, and you see architecture that incorporates and "quotes" lots of architectural styles from the past.  All of this happens because many artists get the feeling there's no point in describing "real" people and situations anymore.  You can only create signifiers about signifiers -- or tell stories about other stories.

One last thing that might help: modernists  (like Hemingway) believed that modern people were becoming alienated from everything fundamental and natural and "real," and they tried (again like Hemingway) to write in a way that would re-capture reality and give it back to their readers.  A postmodernist (like Barth) is someone who's given up any hope of ever getting back to nature or reality -- or maybe doesn't believe those things were ever there to begin with.  One way a postmodernist can express his or her belief that there is no way to get back, or that there's no nature or reality to return to, is to write metafiction -- stories about stories, instead of stories about what's real.
 

Some Pointers for the English 215 Essay

Let this be the standard essay assignment for the course:

In a (roughly) five-page essay, compare and contrast philosophies, viewpoints, and/or opinions from two or more works we’ve read this semester, explaining which of those works’ ideas seem more applicable to and/or descriptive of the America you live in and why you think so.  Be sure that a) at least one of those works is a novel, that b) at least two different aesthetic/philosophical movements we’ve discussed are represented by those works, and that c) you’re making some substantive use of your knowledge of those movements in your essay.


So that’s that.  If that topic doesn’t float your proverbial boat, you can talk to me about a paper you’d rather write instead – but do talk to me first.

No matter what you wind up writing on, your essay should have a clear thesis, or central idea.  It should be well organized, and transitions between its ideas should be readily followable.  Your essay should have sufficient support for its claims, whether in the form of quotes from the texts it examines or first-person stories about things you've seen or experienced in your own life.  And it should be well proofread, with very few spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors.

As that business about the second type of support you can use probably suggests, your essay doesn’t have to adopt an “objective” or “scholarly” tone.  It’s fine to write in the first person and to discuss unabashedly your own experiences, opinions, and convictions.  Even if you are writing in the first person, though, in a more “personal” voice, you should still be well organized and followable throughout.

If you’d like to consult and incorporate the ideas of professional literary critics, that’s fine, but I don’t expect it and you won’t necessarily write a better paper by doing it.  Incorporate research only if you find yourself reading outside critical works that will really help you build whatever thesis you want to develop.

If you do quote anything in your essays that we didn’t read for class, be sure to attach a “works cited” page listing those items.  Otherwise, just put page numbers in parentheses at the ends of your quotes.

Your essay should be double spaced and done in twelve-point font.  And it should have a title – a good one.

I think that’s it.  Call or write if you have questions as you’re working.  Bye –