Section 6 1975-Present

• He is called the first philosopher with a truly postmodern view
• Absolute truth does not exist
• A fixed interpretation of literary works cannot exist; one's subjective reasonable is as truthful as another’s.

World events; old absolutes no longer applied; i.e. the Holocaust, depression, nuclear warfare
People began to challenge language, gender, race, theater (the way it is written and performed)

• No single correct way to interpret script
• Deconstructionism: take apart the text and look for unintended and contradictory meanings
• Writer’s intention? WHO CARES?!
• Re-interpretation of classics
• Everyone’s an author

• Liberal: work within system
• Radical: the whole system is corrupt, women should separate from men/replace male values with female ones
• Neo-Marxist: Look for material conditions that promote gender/class oppression

• Architects that rebelled against stark and purely functional designs of modernism
• They preferred messy vitality over obvious unity
• Fused pop culture with traditional styles
• Liked contrasts of styles (neoclassic building w/ a silhouette of an African hut)

Wanted a truly democratic world; universal freedom, creativity, and elimination of cruelty –Richard Rorty

Skeptical postmodernism and affirmative postmodernism

• Inspired by Nietzsche
• Pessimistic
• Generally Europeans who are scarred by WWII

• Seeks harmonious world where traditional views on gender, race, nations, and cultural biases are dismissed
• Mostly in Anglo-North American culture

• Influenced by modernist avant-garde
• “Theater” = bourgeois conventionalism
• Performer over text
• Personal story/one-person show
• Provocative & confrontational

• Argued it gave the world the atomic age
• Gave a threat of annihilation, pollution, and widening the divide between the “haves” and “have nots”

• It challenges the old systems
• People can do anything and c all it art

• “constructs” new meanings by “deconstructing” old ones
• The old means were thought to be based on erroneous perception and language (misinterpretation)

• Made it possible for the interpreter to  argue with the text and its traditional or historical meaning
• “openness to the other” acceptance of other perspectives

• Female- critiques gender bias among male writers
• Gender- more concerned with gender as a political system and social construct rather than with the distinction b/w m and f
• Gay and Lesbian- (Queer Theory) concerned with literature sympathetic to homosexual lifestyle
  

• rarely linear
• separated into scene often separated by contrasting moods or styles
• forces audiences to assign meanings of their own

• by emphasizing the visual aspects of performance, theater has been reestablished as the seeing place
• box sets and the realistic style are left to tv and film
• no longer "less is more"

• force change
• expose
• accuse and attack
• kill any god except for common sense

• The characters are victims; the audience members are victims themselves and brothers of victims
• Real life and give them the understanding of what the world really is

• Cops- try to close it
• Producers- say it is filth
• Directors- say the white men are too cowardly

• language was faulty and imprecise
• meanings were particular to time and place

• each person can define their own reality
• perceptions became reality