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English 429B Mid-Century American Literature, Key Teal = Science Orange…

- - - - -questions through cultural relativism: civilization is not absolute but that it is relative
      - Our ideas are true only so far as our civilization goes
      - You can’t compare languages of two different cultures and say that the one that isn’t yours isn’t civilized
      - Through an imperial, colonial lens: Boas says there's no hierarchy of civilizations, Western Civilization is not at the top, everything else is not “less than”
- - - - “Heterogenous or contradictory elements of the empirical real world are juxtaposed and recombined into piquant montages”
      - Ex of this in LHD: “the kind is pregnant”, we have futuristic and advanced devices like the stove but not airplanes
      - Reflects back on how we think about our own reality
    - - Where
        
        -Where do we see world reduction in LHD?
        
        Absence of wat
        
        Ekumen’s power to keep the worlds together without laws and executive power
        
        Creating a different concept of gender
        
        Absence of nationalism and patriotism/the definition of the traitor
        
        Absence of the concept of an absolute God in religion
        
        A sense of progress without time being clearly defined always
        
        Handdara religion concepts is not a religious practice on our earth (Le Guin drawing from Taoism)
        
        Exclusion of racism
        
        Exclusion of a “natural” hierarchy of human beings
        
        Exclusion of natural selection/Darwinism
        
        No natural order (predator/prey) in animals that get replicated in social relationships of human beings
        
        A world that has never gone through the stages of industrial revolution, so we don’t see capitalism in the same way
- - - - -double-consciousness: always looking at one’s el through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity
        
        Two-ness as Black and as American
        
        -European existentialism: explores the problem of human existence and centers on the experience of thinking, feeling, and acting
        
        Existentialist dread= a sense of disorientation and anxiety in the face of an apparently meaningless world
- - - - -studies under Franz Boas for anthropology degree, family returns to Haiti and learns about Voodoo religion
        
        Wants to submit a thesis about it to Boas, writes two books about it
        
        -Voodoo: “a worship of the sun, the water, and other natural forces”
        
        Loas are Haitain spirits
        
        -Race doesn’t necessarily have to have the basis of difference between cultures
    - - -Jes Grew is a representation of this continuity through the ages, but where does Reed stand?
        
        Does Reed favour a biological basis/racial soul that survives or Hurston’s idea of cultural traditions passed on?
        
        He is more in line with pluralism of cultures, but this leads to questions of power
        
        How will these cultures survive if the Atonist path suppresses them
        
        Survive through Jes Grew, Voodoo, etc
  - - - -the book is very second-wave feminism
        
        -Erasure: a lot is erased but part of that erasure needs to happen for the imagination of this new place
        
        The purpose of the thought experiment is not to predict the future but re-imagine the present world
        
        It's a thought experiment, not an argument for what is right/wrong
        
        Goes back to the concept of naturalism
      - Le Guin realizes decades later the faults of using “he” as the gender “neutral” pronoun and the “othering” of homosexuals
      - If we all lost our gender, it wouldn’t mean that we would all be straight, but this is what Le Guin implies with the underlying heterosexuality in social relationships on Gethen
  - - - -sapir-whorf hypothesis was hugely influential on Le Guin’s work, as well as the rest of anthropology
      - Monism (opposite of dualism) in religion with the Yomesh = tenseless metaphysics, a structure of reality that is timeless
      - Genly Ai not having the words to describe women to Estraven
      - Layers to dig through in the story because of the different languages
      - Genly acts like he and his culture are more civilized, a higher kind of hierarchy than the Gethenians yet he is misogynistic, Gethen has no wars, etc
      - A novel of miscommunication, clear cultural and metaphysical differences that impede how they are able to understand each other
      - Cultivating our skepticism when we read these narratives because we know its a report that was written after the fact = reminds us of Lolita’s opening
  - - - Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo
        
        The events of the novel take place around the same period of the Harlem Renaissance however it is heavily criticized both materialistically and economically.
        
        Connection to Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
        
        Ellison upset by lack of individuality, sees it as systemic racism but also objected to how the Black Community believed and embraced Park and Burgess (Introduction to Science of Sociology)
        
        -divergence between some Black writers (like Richard Wright) looking for a deeper explanation of Black experience from sociologists and other believing that answers come from the individual (Ellison)
        
        Seeing parallels to this in Mumbo Jumbo when Von Vampton is asking Black poets and thinkers to speak for the race as his “talking Android” and they say they can’t speak for the Black man
  - - - Humbert relates the idea of the nymphet and specifically Delores into a product meant to be consumed.
        
        "You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy , with a bubble of hot poison in your loins... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs-the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb" (17)
        
        Whether or not Dolores feels a lack of power is irrelevant because as the commodity, she holds power over Humbert, as there is a genuine need for him to consume her. This parallels society in that big business need the consumer to purchase rapidly in order to make profit.
        
        Connection to Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
        
        In a similar way to Oedipa obsessing over the Tristero, the reader must participate in finding out what is true and what is imaginary.
    - - Pynchon critiques consumerism and capitalsim
        
        Pynchon writes about the lack of individuality under a capitalist and consumerist regime. This is illustrated through Oedipa discovering a conspiracy - going against the system
        
        Further, when describing Mucho's lack of fulfillment at working at the used car lot he states, "The endless rituals of trade-in... were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life" (5)
- - - - Emmerson builds an idea called the over-soul, that being opposition between human self and nature = over-soal, a concept of God as you are within God encompassing all
        
        Over-Soul
        
        Belief that mind and body are distinct and separable
        
        Emersonian “oversoul” = soul as overriding subject, conscious ego is limited compared to the soul despite us thinking it has more power
        
        Soul is connection to God, God within us
      - Bellow creates a mind/body split - using this to show Wilhelm's isolation from society due to his lack of connection to community. Wilhelm doesn't have an over-soul because of his poor connection.
  - - - Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
        
        Solipsism is shown in "Lolita" through Humbert's ability of storytelling. The story is told through his own thoughts and beliefs, and since this is the only perspective the reader can see. No other character can reveal their true feelings as Humbert is at the forefront.
        
        It could be inferred that the reader receives a moral understanding of Humbert's actions - both the motives and repercussions, however Nabokov states the novel is an "aesthetic bliss" and offers "no moral in tow"
  - - - Tommy calling himself insults in short snaps, switching from narrator to Tommy’s thoughts.
        Bellow shifts inside and outside Wilhelm’s consciousness