Post/Modernism

Question 1

What is NOT an example of an Old Text that is sometimes classified as Post-Modernist?

Accepted Answer

Goethe's Faust, 1772

Question 2

What did Paul Celan do with his poetry?

Accepted Answer

He wrote to explain the camps & besmear the German language after WW2

Question 3

What does this graph describe?

Accepted Answer

The Uncanny Valley

Question 4

Which is NOT one of the Drives Marx, Nietzsche or Freud describes?

Accepted Answer

Man's Search for Meaning

Question 5

What are the approximate dates of the Post-Modern period?

Accepted Answer

~1940s til now, but especially 60s-80s, It's the same as Modernism 1880s til now.

Question 6

Who was Mina Loy

Accepted Answer

A modernist and a mother, A lamp maker, A Dadaist and Surrealist poet, A Futurist

Question 7

What was the main point of the Communist Manifesto?

Accepted Answer

A Materialist analysis of history calling workers everywhere to arms

Question 8

When was the Modernist period approximately?

Accepted Answer

late 19th and early to mid 20th century

Question 9

What did Derrida mean that "there is no transcendental signifier"?

Accepted Answer

Words, concepts and ideas are defined negatively, by what they aren't, Language is all inter-related without an ultimate "meaning word" backstop, He didn't mean anything, he was just 'playing'

Question 10

Who are some other writers often referred to as Magic Realists?

Accepted Answer

Haruki Murakami (Japan), Salman Rushdie (India), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Isabel Allende (Chile)

Question 11

Which is NOT a Post-Modernist classic we looked at in class?

Accepted Answer

Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Question 12

What is Semiotics?

Accepted Answer

The study of Signs, Signifiers & Signifieds, A theory of meaning put forth by Ferdinand de Saussure

Question 13

What character exemplified a Modernist perspective in Chekhov's play The Seagull?

Accepted Answer

Treplev the disturbed playwright

Question 14

What is Deleuze & Guattari's Rhizome about?

Accepted Answer

Valuing Difference and Multiplicities over Homogeneity and Binaries, Imaging the world as a decentered web of roots instead of being treelike

Question 15

Gayatray Spivak's 50 page Introduction to Derrida's "Of Grammatology" was thought to be even more important & hard

Accepted Answer

True

Question 16

It's the end of the world.

Accepted Answer

True

Question 17

Which are NOT typical elements of Post-Modern Literature

Accepted Answer

Solution-Oriented, "Why" & "How" Questions, Scientific Method

Question 18

What is Donald Barthelme's The Balloon "about"?

Accepted Answer

Evoking a certain speculative satirical post-modernist "mood", The inability to locate or pin down a "meaning" for even the biggest things, The relationship between post-modern art, architecture and literature

Question 19

What event did Yeats describe in Poetry?

Accepted Answer

Zeus raping Leda, which led to the Trojan war

Question 20

How is Virginia Woolf's A Mark On The Wall exemplary of Modernist Literature?

Accepted Answer

Epistemological Questions about Life, Experimental Stream of Consciousness Style, Feminist Realist Materialism

Question 21

Which is NOT a feature of Nietzsche's Philosophy?

Accepted Answer

Escape from the Prison of Humanity

Question 22

Lyotard wrote that the defining feature of post-modernism was a kind of incredulity towards "grand narratives"

Accepted Answer

True

Question 23

What did Freud suggest was the driving fear behind blindness in The Sandman?

Accepted Answer

The castration complex.

Question 24

What is the relationship between Deleuze, Cthulhu, and the Anthropocene?

Accepted Answer

Cthulhu represents a Deleuzean non-humanism, & ambivalence towards humans

Question 25

What Characterizes Magical Realism?

Accepted Answer

Magical Elements in an otherwise Realistic World, Often a post-colonial "marginal" literature -- especially South American, An interwoven attitude of acceptance and wonder at the world

Question 26

What is the fundamental characteristic of "Modernism" as an artistic movement?

Accepted Answer

The concept of a "Break with the Past"

Question 27

What do Spivak (Gramsci) mean by the term Subaltern?

Accepted Answer

the "peripheral" sub/ob-ject, often treated as worthless or excluded, The "native" in an imperial colony

Question 28

What is meant by Decentering the Center or refocusing on the Peripheral or Marginal?

Accepted Answer

Post-Colonial subjects form an integral part of a postmodern intelligentsia, Looking for meaning in the fringes of a text rather than the central plot, The very idea of a "center" is egocentric like helioentrism

Question 29

What was Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva especially concerned with?

Accepted Answer

Music, Painting, and Writing, Ontology, The "Instant-Now," Writing Itself, Flowers, Birth, Meditation

Question 30

What Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra about?

Accepted Answer

A neo-Zoroastrian messiah upsetting traditional philosophy & religion, Announcing the death of god and traditional values

Post/Modernism

Questions 30

Post/Modernism

Questions 30