Instructor: Dr. Stephen doCarmo
Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday 3:00-4:00
E-mail: snd3@lehigh.edu

Required Texts
Crane, Stephen.  The Red Badge of Courage.
Hemingway, Ernest.  The Sun Also Rises.
Roth, Philip.  Goodbye, Columbus.
Barth, John.  The End of the Road.
Morrison, Toni.  The Bluest Eye.
Oates, Joyce Carol.  Black Water.
Coover, Robert.  A Night at the Movies.

All of the above are available for you in the Muhlenberg College bookstore.

Course Description
In this course we’ll be reading, discussing, and assessing in writing seven books by seven American fiction writers, each representing a different important movement in modern American literature.  Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage will introduce us to naturalism, a world view prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises will introduce us to modernism, which took the literary world by storm in the 1920s and '30s.  Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus will introduce us to the existentialist-influenced realism of the 1950s.  John Barth's The End of the Road will give us a taste of the postmodernist black humor of the 1960s.  Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye will demonstrate important aspects of literature from the black aesthetics movement.  Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water will represent women's literature after the first wave(s) of the American feminist movement.  And Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies, finally, will give us some idea of what postmodernist metafiction is all about.

See the end of this on-line syllabus for definitions of and notes about each of these literary movements!

The ability to describe each the above movements is what I'm tempted to call the "shallow" knowledge you'll take from this course.  There are two bits of "deep" knowledge I hope you'll get from it too, though.  The first is that literature, like all art, does not traffick in eternal, universal Human Truths; rather, its ideas about truth, reality, and human nature change -- sometimes drastically -- 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 we  may go on to pursue, good citizenry can only increase when we take time to study historical developments in our culture's art, indicative as that art is of the issues that preoccupy us as a 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 read for that day.  Each entry should be roughly 200 to 250 words long and should address at least one of these four questions:

• What one big philosophical idea does this author seem to be trying to get across to you?
• How applicable are this author's ideas to the America you're living in today?
• Who in our culture would probably disagree with this writer's ideas, and why?
• How does this writer's prose style complement (or fail to complement) the idea(s) he or she wants to get across to you?

No matter what you do in your journal entries, or which of the above questions you decide to address, you should always at some point directly quote some bit of the text you've read for that day's assignment.

I'll collect daily journal entries on an unannounced basis some ten or twelve 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, each of which will be worth 15% of your final grade.  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 / opinions of two of the seven 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 unlimited amounts of 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 may turn in your essay at any point between Monday Sept. 25th (the day we conclude discussion of our second book, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises) and Wednesday, Dec. 6th (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 opening weeks 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.........................................15%
Final...............................................15%
Polished Essay.............................20%
Participation.................................10%

Late Work
The only thing that could become late, per se, 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 of course be given to anyone with a documented learning problem.  If you have such needs, please talk to me about it soon.

Course Schedule
Monday Aug. 28: Introduction to the course.  Questions about the syllabus.  I'll have you do an in-class freewrite I'll collect but won't grade.

Wednesday Aug. 30: Discussion of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, pages 1-30.

Monday Sept. 4: Discussion of The Red Badge of Courage, pages 31-91.

Wednesday Sept. 6: Discussion of The Red Badge of Courage, pages 92-131.

Monday Sept. 11: Discussion of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, pages 11-95.

Wednesday Sept. 13: Discussion of The Sun Also Rises, pages 96-130.

Monday Sept. 18: Discussion of The Sun Also Rises, pages 131-208.

Wednesday Sept. 20: Discussion of The Sun Also Rises, pages 209-251.

Monday Sept. 25: Discussion of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, pages 3-69 (just to read to the break  on 69).

Wednesday Sept. 27: Discussion of Goodbye, Columbus, pages 69-101 (just read to the break on 101).

Monday Oct. 2: Discussion of Goodbye, Columbus, pages 101- 136.

Wednesday Oct. 4: Pre-mid-term-exam review session.

Wednesday Oct 11: Mid-term exam.

Monday Oct. 16: Discussion of Barth's The End of the Road, pages 250 (the book begins there) through 320.

Wednesday 18: Discussion of The End of the Road, pages 321-354.

Monday Oct. 23: Discussion of The End of the Road, pages 355-402.

Wednesday Oct. 25: Discussion of The End of the Road, pages 403-442.

Monday Oct. 30: Discussion of Morrison's The Bluest Eye, pages 3-58.

Wednesday Nov. 1: Discussion of The Bluest Eye, pages 61-93.

Monday Nov. 6: Discussion of The Bluest Eye, pages 97-161 (just read to the break on 161).

Wednesday Nov. 8: Discussion of The Bluest Eye, pages 161-206.

Monday Nov. 13: Discussion of Oates' Black Water, pages 3-62.

Wednesday Nov. 15: Discussion of Black Water, pages 63-99.

Monday Nov. 20: Discussion of Black Water, pages 100-154.

Wednesday Nov. 22: Class nixed so I can do one-on-one conferences with all interested parties about  polished essays.

Monday November 27: Discussion of the stories "The Phantom of the Movie Palace" (13-36) and "Shootout at Gentry's Junction" (53-73) from Coover's A Night at the Movies.

Wednesday Nov. 29: Class nixed so we can watch a movie together at 7:00 on this night.  I'll let you know where before this date what we'll be watching it and where we'll be watching it.  Attendance will be mandatory.

Monday Dec. 4th: Discussion of our film, and of the stories "Cartoon" (135-139) and "You Must Remember This" (156-187) from A Night at the Movies.

Wednesday Dec. 6: Polished Essay due on or before this day.  Review of material for the final exam.
 

I'll let you know what day your Final Exam will be on -- though you can rest assured it will be one day between Saturday, Dec. 9th and Monday, Dec. 19th.
 

Some Notes on NATURALISM

Naturalism (a mode of realism, which we’ll talk more about when we get to Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus) was an attitude prominent in the arts late in the 19th century and in the opening decade of the twentieth.

Naturalism’s central belief is that human life is at the mercy of uncontrollable larger forces originating both inside and outside us.  These forces include our internal drives (fear, sex, hunger, etc.), the society we live in, and the natural environment.

Such thinking gets big at the end of the 19th century for a few reasons.  One is that thinkers like Darwin, Marx, and Freud have become famous and influential.  Darwin says it’s “natural selection” (not the will to live, or Godly kindness) that determines who will live and who will die.   Marx says the masses are at the mercy of a capitalist economy.  And Freud says we’re all at the mercy of internal drives and pulsions we can scarcely hope to control.

Another reason naturalistic thinking gets big in American at the end of the 19th century: not only is the population growing at staggering rates, but it’s settling into densely crowded urban areas where people are living and working more and more (as I suggested in class) like insects.  In these crowded conditions, thinkers and artists are seeing for the first time that there’s not a lot of difference, maybe, between humans, who were previously thought to be individualistic and to have free will, and animals, who we’ve always known live in flocks, herds, and schools and don’t really get to decide their fates for themselves.

Despite asserting that humans are at the mercy of forces beyond their control, naturalistic artists and thinkers find little to be happy about in this.   Their novels, paintings, and poems usually show characters who are suffering as a result of their own lack of control.

The key word in understanding naturalism: determinism — as in, our lives are determined by forces we can’t control.  Why the movement came to be known as naturalistic realism rather than deterministic realism is anyone’s guess.
 
 

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 feeling that “alienation” is a common condition among modern people.  To say someone’s “alienated” means they’re distanced or separated from all things natural and truly human.  Workers, Marx had pointed out, were “alienated” from the products they made in over-mechanized factories.  Urbanites in the world’s new metropolises seemed alienated from the natural environment and landscape.  Freud had suggested most “civilized” people are alienated from their own desiring “ids.”  And lots of other thinkers believed modern folks were alienated from each other by an increasingly mechanized lifestyle dominated by machines and new, artificial means of communication.
• The feeling that all certainty and absolute truth are vanishing from our lives.  This happens in the wake of Darwin, who indicts traditional conceptions of God.  It happens after scientists like Einstein, Heisenberg, and Planck disrupt notions of absolute reality, making us wonder how knowable things ultimately are.  It also happens because there is, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a new glut of information, texts, and images in the world.  Newspapers, advertisements, books, radio programs, records….  There suddenly seems to be way more mediation between the knower and thing known than ever before—thus reality starts to seem more and more slippery.  (This is not at all unlike the feeling many folks may still have today.)
• The feeling that technology, rationality, and the idea of “human progress” aren’t all they’d previously been cracked up to be.  World War I—a war full of  technological killing machines and resulting largely from the “rational” project of imperialism—left a lot of artists thinking we should de-invest in mechanization, technology, and progress, since these things were starting to look more dangerous than helpful.

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.

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.

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.

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

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, ragmented, “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.

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 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 or so.  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 as being radically anti-rational.

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 inevitably gets people hurt.  For a postmodernist, all rationality at some point turns fascist, or turns into a way to control people.

A few big things, then, that get canned for postmodernists: 1) 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) belief in teleological history – that is, any perspective 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) belief in science – any type of science – as an instrument that can master reality and make everything explicable and tame.  All these beliefs, again, 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 write a famous book in the late 1960s called Anti-Oedipus, in which they blast 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.”  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 seemed to have swallowed up existentialism whole.
 

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 during the latter half of the 1960’s, though echoes of it are definitely still around today: just listen to Public Enemy’s music or watch Spike Lee’s movies.

There are a few big ideas 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 – the belief 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 most American Civil Rights supporters and was descended from the ideas of Marcus Garvey, a black 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, even if that “something” is often hard to name or pin down.  If European-descended culture is often repressed and moralistic, African-descended culture is more sensual (“funky,” Toni Morrison would say) and forgiving.  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 artists of this movement would’ve 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 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 (like Robert Coover) 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 a song by Beck 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 interpretation."  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 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 ungraspable.

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 seem to be 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 (Robert Coover).  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 Coover) is someone who's given up any hope of ever getting back to nature or reality.  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 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 while 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.), 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 personal lives are political – that kitchens and classrooms and, maybe especially, bedrooms are real political fronts -- places where power relationships are forged and negotiated, even though the law can’t hope to control what goes on in those places.

The flip-side of the above idea – another one important to feminist thinkers – is 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 incapable of valuing 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…?