This week’s discussion post asks about the cultural work postapocalyptic* narratives do in reflecting our (possibly) collective anxieties about the environment, social collapse, machine automation, and mass somnambulism. Try to expand upon that by participating in class discussions. I haven’t read or watched EVERYTHING out there dealing with postapocalyptic themes, so your experiences are important to bridge unfamiliar texts with our course materials.
*post-apocalyptic vs postapocalyptic: come to ENGL 4183 “Editing with Digital Technologies” to learn about hyphens with similar words.
Zone One, “Friday”
We’re reading this book (and all our readings) to consider them from a cultural perspective. Yes, Whitehead wrote a cool story; yes, his language is poetic and stylish; yes, he hates Connecticut. But the bigger picture–how we can relate this to contemporary American culture of the previous decade–provides us a much richer appreciation of the text. In order to maximize your appreciation, you need to read between the lines to locate the American values that Whitehead both highlights directly and comments on subtlety.
We’ve all lived through a “plague,” the COVID-19 pandemic, so I know you can make connections to that; however, let’s hold off (if possible) from commenting on COVID-19 today and save it for next week. Remember, this was published in 2011: post-Obama’s election and post-2008 “Great Recession.”
Walter Benjamin’s essay “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism”
Epigraph: “the gray layer of dust covering things has become their best part” (p.1)
From Walter Benjamin’s essay “Dream Kitsch.” For now, it’s less important to discuss Benjamin’s essay, but you should know what kitsch is. Those of you in art history have your time to shine!
Not to get us too bogged down on Walter Benjamin and this essay…the essay discusses dreams and failed dreams (think back to Bruce Springsteen’s “The River”).
- The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety-indeed, the range-of dreams. (236)
- The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety-indeed, the range-of dreams. (236)
- Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. (236)
Quotations from Part 1, “Friday”
- p. 8: “[Mark Spitz] was adrift on that gentle upper-middle-class current that kept its charges cheerfully bobbing far from the shoals of responsibility.”
- p. 10: “Two days into kindergarten, for example, he attained the level of socialization deemed appropriate for those of his age and sociological milieu…with a minimum of fuss.”
- p. 14: “The mistake lay in succumbing to the prevailing delusions.”
- pp. 20-21: On Human Resources–“…served the places where human beings were paraphrased into numbers components of bundled data to be shot out through fiber-optic cable toward meaning.”
- p. 22: “An indivisible barrier surrounded his zip code, each opportunity to escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal.” (emphasis added)
- p. 25: “They’d wrestled Mark Spitz out of his fatigues the way he’d pried meat out of claws, tails, shells.”
- There is definitely a comment on eating meat that runs through many Zombie narratives.
- p. 31: The monotony of “the dead.”
- p. 35: On chain restaurants…
- “Plenty of American restaurants with a majority American clientele served crap American fare.”
- Think about Applebee’s
- What about cream cheese in sushi?
- The purpose of mentioning this isn’t to dwell on your likes and dislikes but to think critically about so-called ethnic restaurants in the United States.
- Italian chain on American cuisine: Old Wild West … another report on the place.
- “Plenty of American restaurants with a majority American clientele served crap American fare.”
- p. 37: “[Buffalo was] keen for the sweepers to record demographic data: the ages of the targets, the density at the specific location, structure type, number of floors.
- p. 39: “…servitude to the obsolete directives of an obsolete world.”
- p. 42: The Grid–“The truths of the grids rectilinear logic….Gangs of high-rises in Southwest municipalities….tourist mills.”
- What’s living “on the grid” and “off the grid”?
- p. 45: “…his head was suddenly encased in lead and his vision went on the fritz.”
- p. 69: “P-A-S-D”…past.
- Think about one’s past and how your experiences in life make you who you are today.
- Also, on this page, notice the way they refer to the dead body as “it,” yet they gender them before death. In fact, one might claim they eroticize the dead in some cases.
- p.95: Flâneur
Now that I’ve got us started, continue to the end of “Friday” (p. 128).