Exams

Question 1

What is Postmodernism?

Answer 1

More of a critical stance than a theoretical position.
Postmodernism questions any theory or idea that claims to explain all of the knowledge on a subject (totality). In fact, postmodernism’s only absolute position is that all absolute positions must be questioned.

Question 2

What does postmodernism reject?

Answer 2

Postmodernism rejects totalizing, essentialist and foundationalist ideas.

Question 3

Totalizing ideas

Answer 3

all phenomena under one explanatory concept (God’s will, evolution)

Question 4

Essentialist ideas

Answer 4

suggests that there is a reality which exists independent of or beyond language/ideology

Question 5

Foundationalist ideas

Answer 5

suggests that signifying systems are stable and unproblematic representations of a world of fact.

Question 6

Identity

Answer 6

Identity is unstable, fluid, and changing. Rather than having innate essences, we are socially constructed by ideologies (discourses) through language and other practices

Question 7

Language

Answer 7

Language shapes our perceptions of our world rather than reflects it. Klages adds, “language creates and structures everything we can know about ‘reality’. Furthermore, rather than being speakers of language, we are products of language. Language speaks us”(51).

Question 8

Truth

Answer 8

Truth is relative to our cultural position. Our attempts at obtaining truth always reveal our ideological positions rather than some objective reality.

Question 9

Narrative

Answer 9

“Because all truths are relative, all supposedly ‘essential’ constants are fluid and language determines reality, there is no such thing as definitive meaning. There is only ambiguity, fluid meaning, and multiplicity of meaning, specially in a literary text”(Klages 51).

Question 10

Doubt

Answer 10

But I have been led by the bitter necessities of an interesting life to value that age-old practice of the wise: Doubt. There is an uneasy time when belief has begun to slip but hypocrisy has yet to take hold, when the consciousness is disturbed but not yet altered. It is the most dangerous, important, and ongoing experience of life. The beginning of change is the moment of Doubt. It is that crucial moment when I renew my humanity or become a lie.
Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite—it is a passionate exercise. You may come out of my play uncertain. You may want to be sure. Look down on that feeling. We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.
-John Patrick Shanley from “Doubt”

Question 11

Poststructuralist Language

Answer 11

In 1911, Wilhelm Johannsen, a Danish botanist, recognized the need for a new word to help scientists more precisely label and thus conceptualize how traits are passed from an organism to offspring. He felt that many of the misconceptions about heredity came from the inadequacy of the vocabulary they used to describe observable traits and inheritable characteristics. Creating a new word, he felt, would help scientists conceptualize a better way of understanding the differences and move past the older vocabulary which seemed to inhibit other botanists from understanding how the traits were passed down. In his published essay, “The genotype conception of heredity” Johannsen wrote, “It is a well established fact that language is not only our servant, when we wish to express–or even conceal–our thoughts, but that it may also be our master, overpowering us by means of the notions attached to the current words” (132).

Question 12

Structuralism

Answer 12

“We tend to assume that we have the words dog and chair in order to name dogs and chairs, which exist outside any language. But, Saussure argues, if words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next, which is not at all the case” (Culler 28).

Question 13

What do structuralists believe about language?

Answer 13

Structuralists believed that language is a stable system of arbitrary signs.

Question 14

What is a sign? (in structuralism)

Answer 14

A word, which is made up of two parts

Question 15

What are the two parts of a word?

Answer 15

Signifier and Signified

Question 16

What does a signifier do?

Answer 16

It is the form. It means the word, such as “dog”

Question 17

What does the signified do?

Answer 17

It is the meaning. The literal thought of the word, e.g., what people think of when the word “dog” is said

Question 18

What do Poststructuralists believe about language?

Answer 18

Poststructuralists believed that language is a system of signs; however, they believed that the linguistic system is unstable and ambiguous

Question 19

What then is the implication of always approximating using the language we have, especially when we can only use more language to clarify what we mean?

Answer 19

One implication for literature is that the the text has to rely on binary oppositions (two things which oppose each other) in the text to create or anchor meaning.

Question 20

Deconstruction

Answer 20

“Put simply, deconstruction, proceeds on the assumption, that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that frequently betrayed them: they say one thing, but mean another. Their own figures of speech (metaphors, images, figurative terms of phrase) are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. The critic can unravel– deconstruct – a text by reading it as one might read a Freudian slip and just as an awareness of how people unconsciously defend and betray themselves and riches our ability to comprehend them, so a similar awareness in riches are comprehension of a piece of literature instead of agreeing with people self assessments, we learn how to read them in a stealthy and contrary manner, brushing them against their own grain.”

-James Wood, “What is at Stake”

Question 21

What types of questions do poststructuralists ask about language?

Answer 21

Is meaning fixed or stable?
Does the word “dog” have a stable meaning? Does the word “Freedom”?
Or can it mean different things in different contexts?

So when someone says “dog” or “freedom” are we describing the essence of the thing itself or are we using the words we have to approximate what we mean?

Question 22

Episteme

Answer 22

Comes from the Greek word for knowledge or science. It is often considered theoretical/abstract knowledge

Question 23

What is the panopticon?

Answer 23

A type of prison
The word means all seeing eye, and it is compared to what modern life is like. The cells are backlight so that the person inside never knows if they’re being watched.
It is an oval shaped prison with cells on the outside, an annular well in the middle oval, and in the direct middle is the watchtower.

Question 24

What does Episteme do/What is it beyond the definition of it?

Answer 24

Episteme then is the foundation of the discourses
“that create relationships of power/knowledge
which then become the framework within which
human thought and action are possible(Klages
142). Ultimately the goal of these discursive
practices is to produce subjects who “act properly”
without the need of physical repression.
Surveillance is the method through which the
modern subject is formed

Question 25

Techne

Answer 25

translated as either art or craft. It is the practice to Episteme's theory

Question 26

Foucault's Episteme

Answer 26

Questioning not what we see, but how we see it Not what is right or wrong, but what you can conceive of and it has to be connected to your culture because culture is the only way we can conceive things. The level of power helps to shape identity (e.g., teacher and students) QUOTE BELOW FOR CONTEXT, BUT DON'T NEED TO MEMORIZE In the book Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault argues that cultures at different historical periods have different discourses that underlie how cultures’ determine what is true. Foucault later defines episteme, “as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the 'apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific”(“Power/Knowledge” 197).

Question 27

Foucault's Episteme Simplified

Answer 27

Think of Foucault’s episteme as me helping my daughter choose a dress for church. She wants to wear a Disney Princess dress and is throwing a fit about changing. I come to her room which full of clothes and give her a choice between two outfits. She chooses one and the tantrum is over. Why did that work? I am the episteme; I don’t make my daughter’s choice for her but instead define what my daughter is able to perceive as a choice.

Question 28

Foucault's Discourse

Answer 28

The power of Foucault’s discourses to determine what is acceptable as knowledge (like my example of giving a daughter two outfits from which to choose) explains some of sciences most horrifying and infamous ideas like Eugenics, which formed the scientific basis for the Nazi regime’s belief in a super race and was also the basis for the forced sterilization of Down Syndrome adolescents that continued until the 1960’s.

Question 29

Quote about the Panopticon

Answer 29

“So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”

Question 30

Beloved about chapter development

Answer 30

“In short, as the chapter develops, it introduces so many tensions, so many instabilities and it offers so much competition for our attention, interest, sympathy, and understanding that it heightens the disorienting effect of the first paragraph”(63).

Question 31

Beloved about author ethical judgement

Answer 31

“An author who stops short of conveying her own ethical judgment of an action that is central to her narrative is doing something extraordinarily unusual and extraordinarily risky. The narrative may fall apart because the center will not hold, or the narrative will become an inscrutable black hole, which absorbs every element of the work into its inscrutability.  That Beloved escapes both risks is one sign of Morrison's remarkable achievement”(Phelan 53).

Question 32

Beloved on progression of stories

Answer 32

"Thus, the progression of the stories gives us a progression of possibilities for ethical judgment: Sethe has committed a sub human action; Sethe has done the wrong thing but done it instinctively and understandably; Sethe has done something difficult but heroic because it is done for the best motives and it turns out to be a success. Since the progression of the narrative perspectives, from outside to inside, from the white men's to Stamp Paid's to Sethe’s, is a progression toward increasingly sympathetic views, we might be inclined to conclude that Morrison is guiding us towards judging Sethe's version as the one we should endorse. Furthermore, if we stay inside Sethe's perspective, her account is very compelling... But the triangulation of all three stories indicates that Morrison doesn't want Sethe's story to be the authoritative version by calling attention to what Sethe leaves out of her account: the handsaw, the slit throat, the blood, the swing of the baby toward the wall, its death at her hands. In short, Sethe's telling isn't definitive because it erases the horror of her action under its talk of motivations (love) and purpose (safety)" (Phelan 70-1). 

Question 33

Beloved on limits

Answer 33

“Sethe becomes who was once pushed beyond the limits of human endurance and reacted to that pushing in an extraordinary way. Consequently, we turn our judgment on the institution that pushed her beyond her limits. It is of course easy to say that slavery is evil, but it's another thing for readers in the late 20th century to feel the force of that statement, to comprehend the effects of slavery on individual human lives. Morrison's treatment of Sethe’s rough choice moves readers toward such comprehension: in the space where we wrestle with the ethical dilemma presented by Sethe’s choice, we must imaginatively engage with Sethe’s instinctive decision that, when faced with the prospect of slavery, loving her children means murdering them. Such engagement transforms slavery from an abstract evil to a palpable one”(Phelan 77).

Question 34

Epistemology

Answer 34

Study of how we know things

Question 35

Memory

Answer 35

every time we remember something, we damage it a bit more

Question 36

Order

Answer 36

order in which you show a story

Question 37

proportion

Answer 37

amount of ink and focus on a story

Question 38

circular language

Answer 38

meaning is not derived from fixed referents but from the internal relationships within language itself.

Question 39

metanarrative

Answer 39

all encompassing/ "grand storytelling" and totalizing (the things they carried)

Question 40

meta fiction

Answer 40

fourth wall breaks and draws attention to its fictionality

Question 41

religion and pomo

Answer 41

- flaws pointed out in instability in system - personal relationship w/ God if the author is religious--spirituality v religion - roots conflict- within the instability to be able to find something that is still meaningful - challenges morality & good and evil - concept of God's will - post humanist turnback to something

Question 42

discourse

Answer 42

language and understanding that surrounds knowledge

Question 43

more context on structuralism

Answer 43

Early 20th century thought that language is arbitrary, and was revolutionary in academic discourse

Question 44

What is hyperreality?

Answer 44

An imitation of reality but not actually reality

Question 45

Simalucra/Simalucrum

Answer 45

imitation of something in reality

Question 46

Simulations

Answer 46

representations of some form of experience

Question 47

Who came up with the hyperreality concept?

Answer 47

Jean Baudrillard (simulacra and simulations are his idea)

Question 48

representation

Answer 48

to make present again

Question 49

Simulacra quote from ppt

Answer 49

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.” 

Question 50

Hyperreal quote from ppt

Answer 50

"the generation by models of a real without origin or reality."

Question 51

What was Baudrillard's view of hyperreality during the Gulf War?

Answer 51

In Baudrillard’s view, hyperreality during the Gulf War refers to the collapse of the distinction between reality and its representation, where the media spectacle of the war became more real than the actual events on the ground.  Thus, when he declared "The Gulf War did not take place," he meant that the real war—with its human suffering and political complexity—was eclipsed by a virtual war, produced for global consumption and strategic symbolism

Question 52

Baudrillard's argument about map and territory

Answer 52

"Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”