Mixedtea's Weblog

I AM MAN!!!

mixedtea — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:30:31 +0000

So, masculinity is constantly an issue in this novel. Masculinity is brought up as if it is some sort of secret club. Some men know the secret to being masculine while others never got the memo. The significance of this, as the ”mechanic” so beautifully points out, is that masculinity is handed down from father to son. As we all know, not all sons have fathers and so the quest for masculinity begins. The mechanic lets us know that the father is also the model for God, the removal of the model brings up questions about the signified, or GOD himself. This generation of men searching for fathers, god, and masculinity, at some point, after turning up empty handed their whole lives, will embrace the rejection and formulate their own masculinity. In this way, Bob and his former-body-builder-bitch-tits symbolize the breakdown of a false steroid induced masculinity which is rebuilt with the fight clubs. About the competing masculine metanarratives in this novel, Jameson would argue that there nolonger exists a historical idea of masculinity, ther only exists ideas about masculinity as represented back to us by art.

Space monkeys

mixedtea — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:16:30 +0000

Whats the significance of the “Space monkey” thing… I guess it is something pretty obvious since no one brought it up in class. For a hot second I thought it was just something Chuck made up, but at one point the baggage handler calls the flight attendants “space waitresses” so, Im assuming there is more significance than just a made up nickname…. I feel like I’m missing the totally obvious point behind this, so can anyone help me out?

Jameson

mixedtea — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:10:14 +0000

Jameson’s Postmodern idea that we have no history, was like pulling teeth for me. The class discussion was helpful, but I still didn’t feel like I was “getting it”. . . until I started reading Zizek. Thats right, Zizek helped me. ha. seriously though, the reading for Eng 330 has been my most frustrating class until now. Zizek is giving me some parallels through which, although most likely completely unaccurate, have seemed to help me make sense of Jameson’s thoughts on the PM. Here goes: Ideology is the same as a metanarrative. competing ideologies function as competing metanarratives. Zizek says that we cannot understand the past because we look at it through our own ideology (metanarrative) which cannot be the same ideology the past was looked at through when it was in fact the present. We can never see history accurately, not because there are too many movies about Titanic, but because the ideologies that existed during that time no longer exist in the exact form….. Therefore: Lacan’s idea of the REAL is what all those postmodern people are pointing at and can never outright say because to say it would be impossible.

Fight Club Film

mixedtea — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:23:49 +0000

The characters in this film are wild. They are such off the wall people that they give the film an almost comedic undertone. Bob. While his bitch tits are absolutely gross and hillarious, the fact that this is a common reaction to such physical attributes is Palahniuk’s commentary about a large number of people in society. It isn’t Bob’s fault he has bitch tits, and in all reality its quite sad that he is such a bizarre character. Marla is a little different, her insanity is different from Bob’s in the sense that she is a much more intense character. The dark eyes and matted hair however, give her an almost cartoon-like image. The cinematography also adds to the intensity the audience feels from Marla as the shots ofter swing around her, and approach her face from odd angles. It will be interesting to read the physical descriptions about these characters in the novel.

Lyotard

mixedtea — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:15:28 +0000

For me this reading was quite helpful, and the class discussion even more so. It was good to know that there are so many different definitions of postmodernism which we don’t need to prove or disprove, but rather group into categories, align with theorists, and think about which ones we relate to most. One part of the reading which was clarified for me in class was that Lyotard thinks of postmodern as differences in style instead of as a historical point in time. I definately agree with this idea since posmodernism is such a distinct style (or lack thereof).

Winterson

mixedtea — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:04:18 +0000

The transition that begins on page 113 seems to be Winterson again changing the form. By so drastically breaking from the previous writing style, she really allows herself to say alot more about the narrator. This section becomes the narrator’s changing thought prosess as he/she begins to see Louise physical piece by physical piece. At this point, it could be argued that the narrator begins to realize that he/she has only ever seen Louise in the physical sense. This idea brings up the question: can we ever really know someone? Another way this section of the novel could be read is as the narrator’s driven quest to learn all that she/he can about cancer. The narrator’s obsessive thought process is displayed by the many segments associated to the human (and more specifically, Louise’s) body.

written on the weblog

mixedtea — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:54:16 +0000

Having never read a book by this author, I was not sure what to expect. After our class discussions I was expecting an off-the-wall collage of insanity, but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed the use of cliches about love in the beginning. I know its cliche to use cliches in one’s writing, but I’m pretty sure they work well when the author recognizes the cliche and uses the cliche as a cliche. ha. The lack of gender given to the narrator removed any assumptions about him/her/it that I was prepared to make, and I thought it worked to the author’s advantage ( partly because I read Barthes “The death of the Author” for 330 today). My only regret about the lack of gender assigned to the narrator was that I can assume there won’t be any vividly detailed accounts of gettin it on. I hate reading good books for class because I can never do the minimum reading-I always finish the novel instead of doing work for my other classes (writing poetry).

Me- modern or postmodern?

mixedtea — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 20:44:51 +0000

In response to the Malpas reading, I would have to consider myself a mix of both modern and postmodern, leaning more towards postmodern. Of the words listed on pg.7 by Ihab Hassan, I can relate more easily to the words in the postmodernism column: play, chance, anarchy, antiform, desire, mutant, schizophrenia, difference, in contrast to the words in the modernist column. As Malpas goes on to discuss, the modernist words evoke ideas of “closure and rigid organization (8)” while the postmodern words exhibit a more openness.

The most telling point I got out of the reading is that both modern and postmodern seek to display the dirty secrets of a culture or society. They both seem to represent a quest for truth about human nature, government, and power by displaying disfunctionality. As the world becomes smaller due to media and technology, the hidden taboos of a society or culture become harder and harder to hide, and modernism and postmodernism attempt to bring these disfunctions to light. I am all in favor of airing out dirty laundry, so these forms of doing such are very appealing to me. I know that I personally dont fit a particular “norm”, and would not want to be classified or put into a box. Further on in the reading, Malpas brings up the criticism of Lyotard who compares modern and postmodern to the “sublime” as oppose to the “beautiful.”Lyotard goes on to say “The postmodern artist of writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes or the work he creates is not in principle governed by preestablished rules and cannot be judged. . . such rules and categories are what the work or text is investigating.Lyotard is implying that postmodern represents the exploration of society and the rules that guide it, at the same time as attempting to destroy them.

The line that stood out to me the most during the reading was that postmodernism “presents culture as a continually mutating entity that is made up of a series of challenges and readjustments (31).” Society evolves, individuals evolve, thought evolves, and postmodernism is just another stop on the evolutionary journey.