Postmodern Literatures -- Sample Movements and Styles
Beat Movement - Beat Writers
-> protest and innovation
Literary avant-garde movement
Critique of 1950s America
protest & dissent (see Whitman, Thoreau)
Outsiders, non-conformism
in a tradition of Walt Whitman or Henry David thoreau
major forces in American social, political and cultural expression
attack contemporary life and society
immense influence on popular culture
-> protest and innovation
Liberation of the individual
being outcast
Breaking of limits/taboos
Mystical experience
beat
driving force
spiritual insight
energetic
freedom as a central American ideal that needs to be realised
obscenity trials against howl,
Lawrence Forlengetty was arrested for publishing Ginsburgs Howl but he won the case
Beat writers have a preference for open and free forms and actual performances
representations
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, Carolyn Cassady, Joan Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Diane die Prima, ...
Six Gallery, City Lights (October 7 1955, first major public reading of beat poetry)
Alan Ginsberg, Howl(1956)
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
one of the central beat-generation novels
set in the late 1940s
the characters are actually based on real-life identities
paradigmatic of a counter cultural, anti-establishment work
a journey structure, traveling across the continent is representative of the inner restlessness and the searching for a better America
a spiritual journey
an examplary liberation of the individual in all respects
POSTMODERN THEATER
experimentation, improvisation, audience involvement
performance as the central aspect, the process, not so much the story line, plot, or outcome
Happenings: Allan Kaprow
focused on performance art
focused on the event/process/interaction with the audience
Happenings are different each time because the audience is different each time thus the interaction is different each time, just as the whole performance
outcome is not predictable
happenings develop an international and transnational dynamic and spread inter and transnationally
The Living Theater: Judith Malina, Julian Beck, 1947, NYC
still exists today
spread internationally
focus on experimentation
emphasises politics and activism
activist
pacifist
anti-hierarchical
post-dramatic
not a traditional theater drama
toured in Europe
Characterized by a strong attempt to challenge societies power relations and hierarchical structures
impacts their sights and performance, which include streets and prisons
strong turning away of materialist culture
turning theater into activism
Open Theater: 1963-1973
Experimentation and Improvisation
"The living theater had become too politically activist"
Bread and Puppet Theater: 1962/62
exists until today
Peter Schumann
NYC>Vermont
opposed the Vietnam war
a very activist and protest oriented theater
They share bread with their audience
Explain to people that war produces collatoral damage
Examples
Amri Baraka(Leroi Jones), Dutchman, 1964
Tennessee Williams
a Streetcar named Desire, Glass Menagerie
the plastic theater
"Truth, life or reality is an organic thing, which the poetic imagination can represent and suggest in essence only through transformation" "Plastic theater must take the place of conventional theater"
in theater, emotions, circumstances and psychologies manifest in what you see on the stage, music, lighting etc. contribute to the development of the characters psychology
what you see/experience on the stage contributes to the creation of emotion
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, 1949
Discusses the American dream and the opportunities
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 1959 (Langston Hughes; Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park, 2011)
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly, 1988
falls in love with a woman who later turns out to be male and an chinese spy
August Wilsons, The Piano Lesson, 1990
Is about racism, wealth and power relations
Paul Vogel, How I learned to drive, 1998
Current pandemic and its impact on theater
Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife, 2004
Dinner with friends
the shallow character of suburbia
Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced, 2013
experience of Muslim Americans and Islamophobia
Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori, Soft Power, 2020
draws on Henry Hwangs life, Hilalry Clinton, Democracy, Racism and New Topics
New Realism (1980s/1990s)
More plot and character oriented narratives again
topics
Middle Class/American Family/suburbia
Migration
social issues, city life
violence
New regionalism
historical novels
Life, lifestyle, youth
Neo slave narratives
Neo-Slave Narrative
Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize for Literature 1993
Re-memory and magic realism
beloved(1987)
focuses on excessive kinds of love
religious love
romantic love
motherly love
the love of god
discusses the history of oppression
indiscapability of the past in the present
re-writing of a well known form
discusses in retrospection slavery and the continued impacts of slavery on life, even after abolition and even until today
a magic realism
works with non believable, magic elements which symbolize real processes/circumstances like the continued impact of Slavery
going through the past again and again because of the haunting impacts of the past
become again a member of a community which you lost in the past but by re-memory you again become a member
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, movie adaptation
being a pre-black man in the north
although he was free, he was captured and claimed to be a slave
in the end he is set free
critics have said the movie is a "White Saviour Movie"
relationship of dependencies and hierarchies
Establishment of a White saviour -> problematic movie adaptation
Responses to 9/11
Traditional narratives
family novels
fiction that sets 9/11 in relation to historical events
discusses the experience of death and provides new views on NYC
graphic and visual structures
Gained major force in the 1980s onwards
Spiegelmans maus
George Takei
They called us enemy
March book one
civil rights movement
Global/Transnational Fiction
Auma Obama: Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen
Released in German first
Barack Obamas African Half-Sister
Grew up in Africa, moved to Europe and did her studies in Germany
a very transnational and international identity
Her memoir also discusses America, esp. Barack Obama
Performance Poetry
Hip Hop
Rap
Performance/Post Modernism
Experimentation
Resistance
Radical Language and attacks of social activism fused with literature