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3923d29
|
For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
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|
death
gaiman
graphic-novel
postmodernism
sandman
|
Neil Gaiman |
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a35d265
|
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
|
|
art
avant-garde
confidence
culture
david-foster-wallace
ebullience
idealism
irony
meta-modernism
metaphor
post-ironic
postmodernism
shia-lebouf
|
Robert Hughes |
|
dd7fcbe
|
Change. Change. Change. Change ... change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.
|
|
delirium
gaiman
postmodernism
|
Neil Gaiman |
|
fd0d64f
|
"Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to."
|
|
cloud-atlas
disgust
hate
history
postmodern
postmodernism
reflection
self-discovery
self-disgust
|
David Mitchell |
|
9e1959b
|
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
|
|
improvement
learning-from-mistakes
loser
perspective
postmodern
postmodernism
winner
wisdom
|
David Mitchell |
|
e849163
|
"Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?" "No."
|
|
delirium
dream
gaiman
postmodernism
sandman
|
Neil Gaiman |
|
a6bf587
|
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
|
|
literary-criticism
literary-theory
narrative
nineteenth-century
novels
plot
postmodernism
reading
semiotics
victorians
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
|
4032dfc
|
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
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|
postmodernism
|
Flannery O'Connor |
|
9be5998
|
[We] saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?
|
|
postmodernism
|
Don DeLillo |
|
753a950
|
Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you've never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.
|
|
genre-crossing
horror-novels
house-of-leaves
love
mark-z-danielewski
metaphyscial
postmodernism
romance
|
Mark Z. Danielewski |
|
0d2ece0
|
Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
|
|
apoliticism
argument
atheism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
cold-war
communism
conviction
critical-thinking
enlightenment
euphemism
eurocentricism
faith
film
george-hw-bush
george-orwell
german-people
germany
groupthink
hedonism
humanism
individualism
irony
journalism
left-wing-politics
lies
literary-criticism
literature
los-angeles
margaret-thatcher
monotheism
munich
orthodoxy
personality-politics
politics
polytheism
populism
postmodernism
potus
progress
radical-politics
religion
right-wing-politics
ronald-reagan
russia
science
sectarianism
self-love
self-pity
socialism
solipsism
south-africa
soviet-union
thomas-mann
totalitarianism
tribalism
truth
united-states
xhosa-people
zulu-people
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
29db738
|
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big - ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
|
|
belief
capitalism
faith
grand-narratives
islam
islamic-fundamentalism
islamic-terrorism
islamism
life
metaphysics
philosophical-scepticism
philosophy
postmodernism
pragmatism
religion
western-culture
western-world
|
Terry Eagleton |
|
619f19a
|
It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.
|
|
postmodernism
|
Don DeLillo |
|
5875386
|
I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated?
|
|
edward-said
literary-criticism
literature
postmodernism
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
6626b8c
|
I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.
|
|
orthodoxy
postmodernism
skepticism
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
9369419
|
Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).
|
|
derrida
interpretation
philosophy
postmodernism
presuppositional-apologetics
|
James K.A. Smith |
|
a0d8280
|
"There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now," she said. "Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing."
|
|
postmodernism
|
Don DeLillo |
|
fb0d6e7
|
[I]n so far as postmodern politics involves a '[t]heoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism,' it is here, in this silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exemplary case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is suspended, 'other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized marking.' In other words, this displacement accounts for the somewhat 'excessive' way the discourse of postmodern identity politics insists on the horrors of sexism, racism, and so on - this 'excess' comes from the fact that these other '-isms' have to bear the surplus-investment from the class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged.
|
|
philosopy
political-theory
postmodernism
|
Slavoj Žižek |
|
2ee222c
|
"So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and double for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they."
|
|
postmodernism
true
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
626fed7
|
"So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they."
|
|
postmodernism
true
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
13c8860
|
"So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they."
|
|
postmodernism
true
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
f99752b
|
The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.
|
|
postmodernism
|
Peter Ackroyd |