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:star: Identity: the individual vs a collective :star:, Post-WWII,…

- - - - In Left Hand of Darkness (pg 181): example of different culture's varying needs for different words to describe snow
- - - - In Invisible Man, Louis Armstrong represents the figure who breaks free from the collective, as individual, to sing apart from band (before returning into the collective)
      - Ellison was a trumpet player from a young age
      - In Invisible Man, music comes close to representing the subconscious (see: allusions to Dante's inferno). Music also emphasizes a kind of language without words
- - - - Post-modernism: defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, as well as opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning
    - - Modernism: reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war.
      - Naturalism: Extreme realism. Focuses on the individual in their environment
    - - Humbert: aestheticism that has lost contact with reality
    - - cut-off from consciousness of other people
      - The Symbolic Power of the Word. (The Invisible Man - becomes a public speaker, and embodies invisibility)
      - Existentialism
        
        a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centers on the experience of thinking, feeling, and acting.
        
        Truth as Subjective
      - Lolita is about cloaked language (the narrative game). Names (Dolores, Lolita, Nymphet) prove uncertainties. (ie. there's a lot of power in her name - each word represents a different version of her that is presented by and for Humbert)
        
        Genly refers to himself as "Genry" by novel's conclusion (he's been changed by Gethen's language and people)
      - Pynchon's Lot 49 Parodies process of meaning-making (desperate search for signs)
      - Language and Meaning-Making: "Embroidering the Earth's Mantle" - Note that Oedipa misinterprets painting series (a kind of confirmation-bias)
    - - Wilhelm's agency is questionable. Yes, he makes choices throughout the narrative, but Bellow's narrative style and impositions (given away by lyrical prose) ultimately Fram Wilhelm as having no agency - because he has no real part in writing his story
      - in Lolita , Dolores is confined to male gaze
        
        she does organize her own escape
        
        But, she also dies in the end (doesn't get to tell her own story)
    - - Parody: Humbert Parodies literary genres (such as travelogues, romance plots, mysteries, thrillers, cinema, etc). - this relies on the reader's knowledge of narrative tradition. Lot 49 also parodies detective fiction
        
        mockery of psycho-analysis
        
        Dr. Hilarious: "Embrace the Fantasy" (from Lot 49)
        
        Parody is coded in political terms: it both legitimizes and subverts that which is being parodied
        
        In Lot 49: parody of meaning-making (what is W.A.S.T.E.?)
      - Science Fiction: thought-experiment that illuminates present day reality
        
        The Left Hand of Darkness is, ultimately, about miscommunication
        
        Skepticism around narration: which is the advanced society?
- - - - In Seize the Day, Wilhelm is a suffering joker
        
        In Lolita, Humbert Humbert would like to have us think he is a suffering joker too
        
        Does Humbert Humbert have too much agency? Contemporary misreadings of Humbert suggest that Nabokov potentially wrote him too well (there's a danger to Nabokov's game: will we slip into sympathy)
      - In Seize the Day, the narrator provides words and imaginative description where Wilhelm can't (the narrative lexicon is not his own)
      - Like a camera swoop: "Wilhelm came in, however, to look around. He examined the photos on the desk..." (103). The language is lyrical, and free-indirect noticing of details that confirm judgements of Dr. Adler (we are in the mind of Wilhelm). But, this lyrcial language is not Wilhelm's and risks reminding reader of the artificiality of the novel
      - Free-indirect discourse (fluid narrative style). whose voice is telling the story: narrator, character, or author?
      - Genly: an outsider who meets the group (admittedly judgemental)