Postmodernisms

HUM 2052: Civilization IISpring 2011Dr. Perdigao

April 25-27, 2011

René Magritte, Time Transfixed (1939)

http://vr.theatre.ntu.edu.tw/hlee/course/th6_520/sty_20c/painting/magritte-01X.jpg

René Magritte, Not to Be Reproduced (1937)

http://psyc.queensu.ca/~psyc382/magritte-notrepro.jpg

René Magritte, The False Mirror (1928)

http://www.rogallery.com/_RG-Images/Magritte/Magritte-The_False_Mirror.jpg

Escher, Eye (1946)

http://www.globalgallery.com/prod_images/600/esc-e55.jpg

Disturbia?

http://www.filmposters.it/imgposter/grandi/donnie-darko-poster-1.jpg

The Bunny!

http://tf.org/images/covers/tf.org-Donnie-Darko-free-2008.jpg

All things Darko

http://www.posters.ws/images/981539/donnie_darko.jpg

Way!

http://boston.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.cfm?thread=948522

On Donnie• http://www.donniedarkofilm.com/

• Eye—in poster, eye on engine, dream with sky (back to Magritte?)

• Graham Greene’s The Destructors

• Grandma Death

• The Philosophy of Time Travel

• Hawking’s A Brief History of Time

• Wormhole, time travel

• “Where’s Donnie?”

The End of the World…?• Pleasantville (1998)• “The first thing we have to do is to separate out the things

that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant”• Fin de siècle mentality?• Twenty-first century: 1950s culture• Normative identities for women, men• Social constructedness• Performativity• Film begins with 20th century contexts, famine, poverty• Escapism through the show (from familial problems)• Pirandellism?• Geography class• End of Main Street is its beginning• Overemphasis on order

Contextualizing Utopia• 50s programming, twin beds, Brady Bunch scandal

• Shifts with rock and roll, rebel culture

• Books filled in when remembered: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye

• Book burning, censorship

• Garden—Eden, Eldorado?

• Eve offering apple, replayed, “go on, try it.”

• “You don’t deserve this paradise.”

• Question of values, “holding onto those values that made this place great”

“Across the Universe”• Civil Rights in 1950s

• “Whitey”

• “colored girlfriend,” “no coloreds”

• Now violence, threat of rape, looting, mob, book burning—dystopic

• Non-changes view of history in classes, favoring continuity over alteration, new rules

• Mural on wall: woman, kiss, records, bowling, town hall into water, Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, Moby Dick burning

• Now court system, first trial (Oresteia?)

• After court case is resolved, color tv, images of world, history

• Multiple possibilities at end? Prototype for “The Garden of Forking Paths”? Donnie Darko?

Mapping• Ideas about civilization, self and other, civilized and savage: Of

Cannibals; Frankenstein; Heart of Darkness; Valery; Spengler; Freud; Serenity; Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber; Slaughterhouse-Five; Pleasantville

• Politics and power: The Prince; Hamlet; Marx and Engels; Notes from Underground; Heart of Darkness; Pleasantville

• Religion: Don Quixote; Hamlet; Candide; Frankenstein; Heart of Darkness; Sartre; Slaughterhouse-Five; Donnie Darko

• Science: Candide; Frankenstein; Darwin; Freud; Notes from Underground; The Garden of Forking Paths; Donnie Darko

• Gender politics: Don Quixote; Hamlet; Candide; Sophia; Von Hippel; Frankenstein; Notes from Underground; Heart of Darkness; Pleasantville

• Identity crises and play: Don Quixote; Hamlet; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Slaughterhouse-Five; Donnie Darko; Pleasantville

• Ideas about textuality, the place of art, literature: Don Quixote; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Slaughterhouse-Five; The Garden of Forking Paths; Pleasantville