More notes

[The city life as a central force in society...]

[Reliance on intuitive insight - that one can see the essence (or the soul) of things.] cf Inductive Reasoning/ Empirical Methods.

Think: 'The Waste Land': IMAGISM -> MODM.
- broken, fragmented images, anti-narrative, generally disjunctive. Metaphor of seeing and vision.

Seeing and vision = central to Modm (see to the heart of things). But, in TWL, the reader doesn't see so much... The narrtor promised to show the reader a different meaning / to show the reader how to make meaning from dislocation and from fragments. "The construction of an exclusive meaning was essential to Modm."

Formal Characteristics of Modm:
- Open Form
- Free Verse
- Discontinuous Narrative
- Juxtaposition
- Intertextuality
- Classical Allusions (cf Romanticism)
- Borrowing from other cultures/ languages
- Unconventional use of metaphor

This is all sounding remarkably like post-modernism. PoMo, is, after all, entirely reliant on what came before. I mean, it has to be, in order to reject it.

Thematic Characteristics:
- Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
- Alientation of the individual within their (broken and fractured) community
- Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
- Valoristion of the despairing individual in the force of an unmanageable future
- Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology
- Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes

-isms I enjoy reading about: Symbolism, Impressionism, Expression, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism.


Update (after receiving notes on the above): On Centrifugal vs Centripetal readings...
Just to clarify this for me:
I seem to remember from studying physics that what we think of as centrifugal force is just centripetal force. Certainly centripetal force is what we get when we're being spun around ("centripetal" = Latin for "centre-seeking"). So it's the force required to stay in the same place (realtive to the centre) while being spun. If centripetal force isn't enough, or is removed, then the object will fly off on a tangent.

So "centrifugal force" and "centripetal force" is the same phenomenon, just the reaction of an object's inertia when released from rotation (centrifugal), or retained in rotation (centripetal). So there's some confusion there, I guess. Not the least of it from me.

In terms of readings, a centrifugal reading would leave the idea ("centre"), and a centripetal reading would stay circling it.

So Modernism would be, to me, a centripetal reading of the formal characteristics... And by the same token, Postmodernism could be seen as a centrifugal reading of these, literally "fleeing" the centre. It doesn't reflect too well on PoMo, though, if the "centre" is a place that one wants to be.

Of course, if we lived in a discernably rotating system (like a space station or something similar) and got the timing right, then centrifugal force would release an object on a straight line from the centre of the rotation. Amusingly enough, I found this comic last week and thought it was great (click the image to enlarge it):

(From XKCD, a maths/humour webcomic.)