Postmodernism (2)

Postmodern Parodies or Assertion of "Author-ity" and Meaning

Outline Postmodern Views of Author

General Questions Theoretical Views Metafictional Views

Literary and Filmic Examples Author as Character: “Las Meninas”, Tristram Shandy; Author as Creator: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Six C

haracters in Search of an Author Loss of Authority: The Icicle Thief The Use of God Power: The Stuntman Self-Fabrications: Cindy Sherman

General Questions: How do we relate an author and his/her work? (A similar question: how do we write our own lives or read our

own histories? Are we “the” author? Is there a God?) Is the author dead after his/her work is done? Author as character: “Night-Sea Journey” Deconstructing Harry

“I” narrator ≠ the author Tries to control, extend and interpret one’s life.

Author as “creator”: The author-god tradition (e.g. omniscient narrator of realist novels

Frankenstein recent sci-fi films ) Copyright issue The “created” fiction and its underlying realities Who writes the script and who ‘embodies’ it?

Determinants of meanings—unified or fragmentary: gender, race and personalities of an author The textual unconscious The social unconscious/ideology or discourse

Theoretical Views

[Roland Barthes] The death of the author = the birth of the reader.

[Wolfgang Iser] The implied author or the signs of author “in” the text.

[Michel Foucault] The author is not the creator of his work, but a label put on this group of discourses.

[Foucault and Psychoanalysis] The subject of enunciation ≠ the subject of the enunciated

Metafictional Representation of “Author” :

1. Be-littled or merely a sign:• the appearance of the autho

r in The French Lieutenant's Woman  as a peck of dust to be brushed off by Charles the characters out of the author's control

• Vonnegut in Dresden in Slaughterhouse-V

• Icicle Thief; “Lost in the Funhouse”

2. the god-game • --the conflict (or struggle f

or power) between the reader and the author in the text

• e.g. Stephen King's Misery and Rushdie's Midnight's Children

• The Magus, The Stunt Man, and The Player

2. Multiple identities –Self-Other Fabrication

e.g. Cindy Sherman

Example I: as Character

--Context/Frame (Author & Viewers) astext;

-- the royal couple put insidethe mirror.

Las Meninas1656

Example I-2: Tristram Shandy (1759 and 1766) –Author as Character

Life // storytelling—telling story to prolong life Shandy on digression “Digressions, incontestably,

are the sunshine;--they are the life, the soul of reading;--take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them; [...] restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids appetite to fail.” (95)

// Midnight’s Children

Example II-1: The French

Lieutenant’s Woman Victorian Author-god vs. postmodern

author (a peck of dust) “The freedom that allows other freedoms

to exist.” The author is still a god, but no longer

omniscient; freedom given through the multiple endings and leaving Sarah unknowable.

Is the author free to create? Are we/the characters free to choose?

Example II-2: Six Characters in Search of an Author 1921

How do we interpret these characters without an author or a script? Why do some characters “live eternally”? Why do they need a producer or an author if the script is in them?

1. The characters as ideas, and to “materialize” means to find embodiments in performances.

2. The characters as outcasts, and the script they want is the officially acknowledged/recognized story.

The Icicle Thief –loss of authorship and author-ity1. The neo-classical film, The Bicycle Thief, is

imitated and turned into The Icicle Thief. 2. The Icicle Thief gets shown by a TV station, so the

director has to sign a release. (clip)3. When playing the film, there is a blackout, and

thus a confusion of the film with the commercial (and commodity) world.

4. The commercial world offers the solution to the family poverty, while the director gets locked up inside the TV set. (clip)

55 (It is said that after this film, no commercial breaks are allowed when a film is shown on TV.)

The Icicle Thief –Multiple Frames of the Commercial WorldFrame I: The director -- losing power: signing the release, caricatured, his plot

changed (undone), becoming a character, locked in the T.V. frame.

Frame II: The TV station and the commercials -- commercialized -- concerned with rating, the host does

not know what he introduces, a lot of commercials Frame III: the audience -- consuming subjects with false choices -- remote

control, the kid with a lot of building blocks, the pregnant woman with a lot of food and the remote, the husband

The Stunt Man

A Vietnam soldier’s homecoming. He accidentally causes the death of a stuntman, so he gets to play the stuntman in the film’s shooting site.

The film – a dark comic version of WWII. The stuntman cannot tell which is reality and

which is film.

The Author-God – Signs of Eli Cross’s Power Helicopter & its Smoke (Eli uses it to shoot from the ai

r) Crane

(Eli’s transportation) How tall is King Kong? T

hree feet six.

Cindy Sherman’s photographs constructed scenarios in which she appears as the protagonist. 

Self-portrait? Assuming various culturally stereotyped guises, she addresses is

sues of femininity, sexual identity, voyeurism, and oppression in cultural representations. 

The earliest works --resembling black-and-white film stills, present Hollywood-fabricated heroines. 

Works from the early 1980s-- in color and enlarged in scale, become increasingly sinister, focusing on the pathology and victimization of women as represented in film and t

he media.  the tradition of portraiture -- exploits the grotesquerie of wealt

hy and powerful patrons through the extensive use of prosttheses, stage makeup, and costumes (Day 69).

Cindy Sherman’s photographs: (1). Untitled Film Stills Lois Lane in the 1950's

television program Superman 

Cindy Sherman –Ambiguous Mimicry and Fragmentary Untitled Film Stills – “the very title suggests that thes

e images have been pulled from a narrative. As such, there is an important temporal element at play here which could not have been managed successfully were these words presented as a series of paintings.” (Hatch 292)

“I was really torn between an infatuation with those periods and feeling like I should hate them, because [of] those kinds of role models.” (qtd Hatch 295) (more images here)

Rejected once by Artforum because they reinforced the stereotypes.

Cindy Sherman’s photographs: (2).the artificial

Cindy Sherman’s photographs: (2).the deadly grotesque –What’s next?

Reference

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/cindy/sherman.htm