"Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?" (1956) - Richard Hamilton

1. "Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?" (1956) - Richard Hamilton

2. Postmodernism: Significant Events • August 6, 1945 - atomic explosion over Hiroshima, Japan The conclusion of World War II • The Korean War (Conflict?) • The Cold War of the 1950s • McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee • The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 • The assassination of President Kennedy, Nov. 1962 Identity Movements of the 1960s: Feminism, Civil Rights/Black Power • The assassinations, in 1968, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy

3. Postmodernism: Significant Events (con’t) • The Vietnam War (Conflict?) • The killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State Univ., 1970 • The resignation of President Nixon in 1974 • The AIDS epidemic • Identity Movements: Gay, Lesbian, Queer movements, Postcolonial movements and minority literature. • The rise of Theory • Culture Wars: debates over canonical inclusion and “great books”

4. Postmodernism Samples (from Jameson) John Ashbery -- David Antin Pop Buildings Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Photorealism John Cage, Philip Glass, the Clash, Talking Heads, Gang of Four Vanguard film: Godard, etc. to Hollywood “nostalgia film” Fiction: Burroughs, Pychnon, DeLillo, French new novel Other samples?

5. Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, Summer 1911 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) Oil on canvas; 24 1/8 x 19 7/8 in. (61.3 x 50.5 cm)

6. Cubist Still Life by Roy Lichtenstein, 1974.

8. Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1969

12. Recurrent Ideas in Theory (from:Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Second Edition. Manchester, 2002) Anti-essentialism—many of the notions previously regarded as universal and fixed (gender identity, individual selfhood) are actually fluid and unstable. These are socially constructed or contingent categories rather than absolute or essential ones. All thinking and investigation is affected by prior ideological commitments. There is no disinterested enquiry. “Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see. Language doesn’t record reality but constructs it. Meaning in texts is jointly constructed by the reader and writer. 4. “Theorists distrust all totalizing notions” (great books, human nature)

13. Barry sums these ideas up in 5 key points: politics is pervasive language is constituative Truth is provisional Meaning is contingent Human nature is a myth.

15. Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles

22. Metafiction “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.” (Patricia Waugh, courtesy of Patrick)

23. David Lodge: 4 Techniques Typical of PM Fiction • Permutation: incorporating alternative narrative lines in the same text • Discontinuity: disrupting the continuity, unity, “reality” of the text (by unpredictable swerves of tone, metafictional asides to the reader, blank spaces in the text, etc). • Randomness: discontinuity produced by composing accord to the logic of the absurd • Excess: as a method of departing from or testing the bounds of “reality”

24. “The Babysitter” fragments “a scream” a fight “Stop it!” “Decides to take a quick bath” a golf club a pair of underpants “are you being a good girl?” “Dolly!” “Where’s Harry?” “peeping in” “Hey! What’s going on here?” “Harry?” “I’m just wrapped in a towel” “I’ll spank!” “Something about a babysitter…” a ringing telephone “Maybe you better get in the tub too” “They’re all dead”