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Postmodernism

A disputed term that occupied much late 20th-century debate about culture from the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th-century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid-1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.

As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism’s alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self-consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. In poetry, it has been applied most often to the work of the New York school and to Language poetry; in drama mainly to the ‘absurdist’ tradition; but is used more widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or anti-novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers. Some of their works, like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Nabokov’s Ada (1969), employ devices reminiscent of science fiction, playing with contradictory orders of reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world.

Opinion is still divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome ‘the postmodern’ as a liberation from the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures; while sceptics regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity. See also post-structuralism.

Baldick, Chris. "postmodernism." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford University Press,  2015. Oxford Reference, accessed 28 Mar. 2019 

Synopsis

Setting

Watchmen is set in an alternate reality that closely mirrors the contemporary world of the 1980s. The primary difference is the presence of superheroes. The point of divergence occurs in the year 1938. Their existence in this version of the United States is shown to have dramatically affected and altered the outcomes of real-world events such as the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon.[31] In keeping with the realism of the series, although the costumed crimefighters of Watchmen are commonly called "superheroes", only one, named Doctor Manhattan, possesses any superhuman abilities.[32] The war in Vietnam ends with an American victory in 1971 and Nixon is still president as of October 1985 upon the Watergate scandal not coming to pass. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occurs approximately six years later than in real life.

When the story begins, the existence of Doctor Manhattan has given the U.S. a strategic advantage over the Soviet Union, which has dramatically increased Cold War tensions. Eventually, by 1977, superheroes grow unpopular among the police and the public, leading them to be outlawed with the passage of the Keene Act. While many of the heroes retired, Doctor Manhattan and another superhero, known as The Comedian, operate as government-sanctioned agents. Another named Rorschach continues to operate outside the law.[33]

Plot

In October 1985, New York City detectives are investigating the murder of Edward Blake. With the police having no leads, costumed vigilante Rorschach decides to probe further. Discovering Blake to have been the true identity of The Comedian, a costumed hero employed by the U.S. government, Rorschach believes he has discovered a plot to terminate costumed adventurers and sets about warning four of his retired comrades: Dan Dreiberg (formerly the second Nite Owl), the superpowered and emotionally detached Jon Osterman (codenamed Doctor Manhattan) and his lover Laurie Juspeczyk (the second Silk Spectre), and Adrian Veidt (once the hero Ozymandias, and now a successful businessman).

After Blake's funeral, Manhattan is accused on national television of being the cause of cancer in friends and former colleagues. When the government takes the accusations seriously, Manhattan exiles himself to Mars. As the U.S. depends on Manhattan as a strategic military asset, his departure throws humanity into political turmoil, with the Soviets invading Afghanistan to capitalize on the perceived American weakness. Rorschach's concerns appear vindicated when Veidt narrowly survives an assassination attempt and Rorschach himself is framed and imprisoned for murdering a former supervillain named Moloch.

Neglected in her relationship with the once-human Manhattan, whose now-godlike powers and transformation have removed him completely from the everyday concerns of living beings, and no longer kept on retainer by the government, Juspeczyk stays with Dreiberg. They begin a romance, don their costumes, and resume vigilante work as they grow closer together. With Dreiberg starting to believe some aspects of Rorschach's conspiracy theory, the pair takes it upon themselves to break him out of prison. After looking back on his own personal history, Manhattan places the fate of his involvement with human affairs in Juspeczyk's hands. He teleports her to Mars to make the case for emotional investment. During the course of the argument, Juspeczyk is forced to come to terms with the fact that Blake, who once attempted to rape her mother, was, in fact, her biological father following a second, consensual relationship. This discovery, reflecting the complexity of human emotions and relationships, re-sparks Manhattan's interest in humanity.

On Earth, Nite Owl and Rorschach continue to uncover the conspiracy and find evidence that Veidt may be behind the plan. Rorschach writes his suspicions about Veidt in his journal, in which he has been recording his entire investigation, and mails it to New Frontiersman, a local right-wing newspaper. The pair then confront Veidt at his Antarctic retreat. Veidt explains his underlying plan is to save humanity from impending nuclear war by faking an alien invasion in New York, which will annihilate half the city's population. He hopes this will unite the superpowers against a perceived common enemy. He also reveals that he had murdered The Comedian, arranged for Manhattan's past associates to contract cancer, staged the attempt on his own life in order to place himself above suspicion, and killed Moloch in order to frame Rorschach. This was all done in an attempt to prevent his plan from being exposed. Nite Owl and Rorschach find Veidt's logic callous and abhorrent, but Veidt has already enacted his plan.

When Manhattan and Juspeczyk arrive back on Earth, they are confronted by mass destruction and death in New York, with a gigantic squid-like creature, created by Veidt's laboratories, dead in the middle of the city. Manhattan notices his prescient abilities are limited by tachyons emanating from the Antarctic and the pair teleport there. They discover Veidt's involvement and confront him. Veidt shows everyone news broadcasts confirming that the emergence of a new threat has indeed prompted peaceful co-operation between the superpowers; this leads almost all present to agree that concealing the truth is in the best interests of world peace. Rorschach refuses to compromise and leaves, intent on revealing the truth. As he is making his way back, he is confronted by Manhattan. Rorschach declares that Manhattan will have to kill him to stop him from exposing Veidt, which Manhattan duly does. Manhattan then wanders through the base and finds Veidt, who asks him if he did the right thing in the end. Manhattan responds that "nothing ever ends" before leaving the Earth to create life elsewhere. Dreiberg and Juspeczyk go into hiding under new identities and continue their romance.

Back in New York, the editor at New Frontiersman asks his assistant to find some filler material from the "crank file", a collection of rejected submissions to the paper, many of which have not been reviewed yet. The series ends with the young man reaching toward the pile of discarded submissions, near the top of which is Rorschach's journal.

 From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

noir

A term derived from French critical usage, both literary and cinematic, and applied in English to a kind of crime novel or thriller characterized less by rational investigation (as in the classic detective story) than by violence, treachery, and moral confusion. In French usage, film noir is a period style of 1940s and 1950s American movie thriller commonly adapted from hard-boiled detective fiction (as in the film versions of The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and others) and distinguished cinematically by the use of menacing shadows and camera angles, while the roman noir (a term once applied to Gothic novels) is broadly equivalent to the thriller. Although noir fiction derives in important ways from the hard-boiled school of detective writing and overlaps with it at some points (especially in the case of James M. Cain’s work), it can be distinguished from most detective stories and from other kinds of thriller by its powerful tendency to dissolve orderly distinctions between the roles of criminal and hero: thus in Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), the protagonists are lured into murder by sexual obsession. In noir fiction generally, rational detachment is overwhelmed by criminal temptation and bewildered by multiple deceptions, and the reader is commonly invited to adopt the point of view of a murderer or of an accessory to serious crime. Leading practitioners include Jim Thompson (e.g. The Killer Inside Me, 1952), Patricia Highsmith (in The Talented Mr Ripley, 1955, and its sequels), and James Ellroy (e.g. The Black Dahlia, 1987).

Baldick, Chris. "noir." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford University Press, 2015, Oxford Reference, accessed 8 May. 2019

From "Nietzsche"

Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most insightful and powerful critic of the moral climate of the 19th century. His exploration of unconscious motivations anticipated Freud. He is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes when it is denied its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religions, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. But the powerful human being who escapes all this, the ‘Übermensch’, is not the ‘blond beast’ of later fascism; it is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style to his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist rather than the warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave himself no words to condemn any uncaged beasts of prey who best find their style by exerting repulsive power over others. This problem is not helped by Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writings is not always straightforward. Similarly, such anti-Semitism as has been found in his work is balanced by an equally vehement denunciation of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater dislike of the German character of his time.

Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of the will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and fact. In particular, he anticipated many of the central tenets of postmodernism: an aesthetic attitude towards the world that sees it as a ‘text’; the denial of facts; the denial of essences; the celebration of the plurality of interpretations and of the fragmented self; as well as the downgrading of reason and the politicization of discourse. All awaited rediscovery in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his perspectivism is echoed in the shifting array of literary devices—humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody—with which he explores human life and history.

Blackburn, Simon. "Nietzsche, Friedrich." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, January 2016, Oxford Online Reference, accessed 11 Apr. 2019

Übermensch

The ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5). Nietzsche thought that such a being could arise when any man of superior potential shook off the conventional Christian morality of the masses to create and impose his own values.

"Übermensch." The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference, accessed 11 April 2019.

Existentialism

Sartrean [from Jean-Paul Satre] existentialism, as distinct from the Christian existentialism derived from [Soren] Kierkegaard, is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in terms of individual responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premiss that ‘existence precedes essence’, implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence. Obliged to make our own choices, we can either confront the anguish (or Angst) of this responsibility, or evade it by claiming obedience to some determining convention or duty, thus acting in ‘bad faith’. Paradoxically, we are ‘condemned to be free’. Similar themes can be found in the novels and essays of Camus; both authors felt that the absurdity of existence could be redeemed through the individual's decision to become engagé (‘committed’) within social and political causes opposing fascism and imperialism. Some of the concerns of French existentialism are echoed in English in Thom Gunn's early collection of poems. The Sense of Movement (1957), and in the fiction of Iris Murdoch and John Fowles. See also phenomenology. For an introductory anthology, consult Paul S. Macdonald (ed.), The Existentialist Reader (2001).

"existentialism"   The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, edited by Chris Baldick, Oxford University Press, 2008, Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press, accessed  28 February 2009.

Comics tend to lean toward the iconic ("The Adventures of a Featureless Blob") because it encourages reader identification. Let's get away from the arena of vagueness (a cheap gimmick designed to flatter the shallow reader) [12] and into the realm of the specific.

Study and contemplate the nature of pictorial stillness. What does the still picture have to offer a narrative that the moving one doesn't. Find and study an intriguing movie still from a film you've never seen, then watch the movie to see how and why it falls apart and loses its compelling mystique.

Think of the comic panel (or page or story) as a living mechanism with, for example, the text representing the brain (the internal; ideas, religion) and the pictures representing the body (the external; biology, etc.), brought to life by the almost tangible spark created by the perfect juxtaposition of panels in sequence.

Consider using all of the "hokey" devices available in comics vocabulary (thought balloons, sound effects, etc.). They are no less inherently neutral than a comma or a whisper of a lap dissolve and it is only their debased usage that has made them so.

The comic book really is a perfect consumer item. It's portable, flexible, cheap enough to be disposable, durable enough to last several lifetimes with proper archival care, lightweight, colorful and simple (no packaging or shrink -wrap required). Think in terms of the entire package, the structural cohesion of every component (from page numbers to indicia, etc.). (11-12)

nihilism
An intellectual and political position premised by the rejection of all moral and ethical values grounded in the belief that there is some kind of higher authority or being (e.g. God, humanity, justice, nature, etc.). The term itself derives from Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1861), where it is used to describe a generation of intellectuals who had become disenchanted with bourgeois life in Russia because they saw it as hollow.

Buchanan, Ian. "nihilism." A Dictionary of Critical Theory, Oxford University Press, 2018, Oxford Reference, accessed 16 April 2019.

nihilism
A theory promoting the state of believing in nothing, or of having no allegiances and no purposes. The term is incorrectly used to characterize all persons not sharing some particular faith or particular set of absolute values.

Blackburn, Simon. "nihilism." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2016, Oxford Reference, accessed 16 April 2019. 

Let’s Get Grotesque

When we hear the word "grotesque," we usually substitute the word "gross."  However, grotesque has specific literary denotations – as follows:

**********************
Grotesque art: "characterized by fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caricature" (Harmon and Holman 239)

Anything having the "qualities of grotesque art: bizarre, incongruous, ugly unnatural, fantastic, abnormal" (Harmon and Holman 239-40)

"Modern critics use ‘the grotesque’ to refer to special types of writing, to kinds of characters, and to subject matters.  The interest in the grotesque is usually considered an outgrowth of interest in the irrational, distrust of any cosmic order, and frustration at humankind’s lot in the universe.  In this sense, grotesque is the merging of the comic and tragic, resulting from our loss of faith in the moral universe essential to tragedy and in rational order essential to comedy [. . . .] Thomas Mann sees it as the ‘most genuine style’ for the modern world and the ‘only guise in which the sublime may appear’ now.  Jorge Luis Borges echoed Mann’s sentiment.  Flannery O’Conner seems to mean the same thing when she calls the grotesque character ‘man forced to meet the extremes of his own nature.’" (Harmon and Holman 240)

"Sherwood Anderson subtitled his Winesburg, Ohio "the Book of the Grotesque," and defined a grotesque character as a person who "took one of the [many] truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live by it.’  Such a person, Anderson asserted, ‘became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood’" (Harmon and Holman 240)

Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman.  A Handbook to Literature.  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

The Paris Review treatment: interview with Ware 

"I found it challenging to convince my teachers that an aspiring cartoonist might also have serious goals, and that I wasn’t drawing comics to follow in Lichtenstein’s footsteps or to say how stupid Americans were but to employ them as a visual language to write about what it feels like to be alive."

"In short, I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense—of space and of being in a body—in a way no other medium can quite so easily, or at least so naturally."

INTERVIEWER

In your comics, there is a strong connection between memory and phys­ical spaces, buildings in particular. Does this have to do with your own way of ­remembering, or with comics as a medium, or some combination of the two?

WARE

I’m vaguely familiar with the idea of "the poetics of space," and I guess it’s something I’ve been indirectly writing and drawing about for years now, but I’m woefully uninformed about any real theories around it. Whenever I come across some article about recent neurological research, like how our brain connections are apparently not just a mass of spaghetti but are organized around X, Y, and Z axes, I feel sort of reassured that maybe I’m on the right track, like maybe we build squared-off spaces to contain our lives partly because our memories need the same sort of filing system, and maybe that’s why the most effective means of remembering something is to place it in an image of a house, or a "memory palace." Or maybe not.

"Art Spiegelman has defined comics as the art of turning time back into space, which is the best explanation of the medium I think anyone’s yet come up with. The cartoonist has to remain aware of the page as a composition while focusing on the story created by the strings of individual panels. I think this mirrors the way we experience life—being perceptually aware of our momentary present with some murky recollections of our past and vague anticipations of where we’re headed, and all of it contributing to the shape of what we like to think of as our life. I try to flatten out experience and memory on the page so the reader can see, feel, and sense as much of all of this as possible, but it’s really not much different from composing music or planning a building."

"It’s also what the core of comics is—a combination of memory and experience into a simplified visual language. What one thinks of as pictures in comics are really the equivalent of drawn words—words meant to be read, not looked at—which is analogous to the way humans perceive the world. Looking is a part of it, but not all of it. It’s ultimately the limiting effect of language on experience, a ratcheting down of perception by the human mind that begins the moment we learn how to communicate with words and to name things. Sometimes I think it’s why time seems to speed up for adults as we age—because we spend so much of our conscious time remembering rather than simply looking."

"The weird "Lint" chapter was inspired both by Portrait of the Artist and by Updike’s story "How Was It, Really?" about a late-middle-aged man who tries to remember his life but only comes up with a handful of details and dissociated moments. I thought frequently of Rabbit Angstrom and of how Updike said that by creating a character who was more or less loathsome, he was able to strangely allow a little more of real life in. Maybe Updike’s wanting to be a cartoonist in his youth and his time on the Harvard Lampoon had something to do with the outside-in-ness of Rabbit’s narrative distance, despite the books’ eventual paradoxical closeness. In the long run I think it’s the writer’s duty to find some reason to love, if not fall in love with, all of his or her characters, no matter how repellent they may be.

Updike once described writing as something of a moral exercise or ­experiment. Writing is not playing, but now that I have a daughter, I see that it involves some of the same impulses. As Lynda Barry might say, you take Barbie’s and Ken’s pants off and see what happens."

"I’ve said this a million times now, but a book can be something of a metaphor for the human body—it has a face that can reveal itself or lie, it has a spine, it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The layering of panels and pages and chapters essentially makes a sculpture in space and in the memory of the reader. I also think there’s a certain poetic harmony ­between the physicality of a book and the ineffability of what it contains, like our bodies with our child selves buried alive inside, to say nothing of what we think of as consciousness somewhere in there as well."

"One of the reasons I stayed interested in comics was their potential for getting at the four-dimensional shape of existence, and a lot of my lame undergraduate stuff—pedantic panel-crossing characters, spinning chairs in space—was a sort of unremarkable, self-conscious fooling around with all that, which has had a lingering taint on how I think of the page, book, et cetera, as a "perpetually existing" sort of shape that only comes alive when read. The best comics make drawings seem to come alive on the page and make the visual connections between moments across pages and even chapters concretely explicit, which is a very different experience from looking  at page after page of gray text. Not to carry this too far, but unlike regular reading, which induces blindness in the reader, comics bring together the half-awake "night and day" of seeing and remembering directly on the page. "

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)  [ . . . .] Though the therapeutic benefits of psychoanalysis are disputed, psychoanalytic ideas have had a profound and lasting effect on literature itself, on criticism, and on literary and cultural theory. In an elegy on Freud, W. H. Auden observed that his ideas had become a ‘climate of opinion’, and it is true that many of Freud's concepts, often in simplified or vulgarized form, have entered educated and even common discourse—e.g. Oedipus complex, repression, the death instinct, penis envy, narcissism, ‘Freudian’ slips, phallic symbolism (about which he was sceptical), and his formulation of mental structure as a division between ‘Id, the Ego, and the Superego’. Freud's thinking was deeply influenced by literary sources, and on occasions he was tempted to write directly on literary topics. Some of these pieces, such as his essay on ‘The Uncanny’, have been seminal. [. . . .]
"Freud, Sigmund." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Birch, Dinah. Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Web. 8 May. 2016