Framing Essay
The theories in Jameson’s text “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” can be used to analyze Barthelme’s short story, “I Bought a Little City.” In Barthelme’s story, the city owner made modifications to a good city with the intention of bettering it. Instead, he stripped away the city’s individuality and originality. Jameson’s text allows us to interpret Barthelme’s short story and gives us a revelation of the main character’s behavior and his reasoning behind it. The framework that Jameson utilizes helps us understand why the city owner in “I Bought a Little City” alters a perfectly industrialized city with antique ideals.
Jameson introduces the idea that postmodernism, the absence of innovation, is a concept that plays an active role in our society but is not accepted as so. This is not widely accepted because it is frowned upon to not be unique or exclusive in our day to day lives. Being able to cultivate your own styles and ideas makes you a more desirable person in our culture. Jameson concedes that postmodernism has a main characteristic,
The city owner examined his newly purchased city and was pleased, but began making changes: “What a nice little city, it suits me fine. It suited me fine so I started to change it.” (Barthelme, 1974, p. 51) He made all of the citizens move out of their stately homes and proceeded to tear them all down. After doing this, he sought out advice from a citizen named Bill Caulfield to gain some insight on what they desired their future homes to look like. One of Bill’s requests was that he desired more privacy in the new structured homes. To ensure that his idea was as transparent as possible he showed the city owner a Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle. The city owner didn’t have any personal ideas for the new housing so he copied Bill’s concept of the jigsaw puzzle and used it as a blue
Now, a normal sized town contains fast-food joints, supermarkets, malls, and superstores, but a small town lacks that appeal. The small-town could be the most beautiful landscape known to man, but lack the necessary luxuries in life that a typical American would benefit from. Carr and Kefalas make this statement that emphasizes the town’s lack of appeal, “Indeed the most conspicuous aspects of the towns landscape may be the very things that are missing; malls, subdivisions, traffic and young people” (26). The authors clearly state that they realize that towns, such as the Heartland, are hurting because of the towns’ lack of modernization. For all intents and purposes, the town’s lack of being visually pleasing is driving away probable citizens, not only the native youth, and possible future employee’s away from a possible internship with the town. The citizens with a practice or business hurt from the towns inability to grow up and change along with the rest of the world, yet the town doesn’t realize what bringing in other businesses could potentially do for their small town. Creating more businesses such as malls, superstores and supermarkets would not only drive business up the roof, but it’ll also bring in revenue and draw the
Macey, David. “Postmodernity.” The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin Books, 2001. 307-309. Print.
Richard Louv attempts to question the modern consumer culture of the United States by juxtaposing the complexity of purchasing a modern “Mercedes SUV” with the simplicity of staring out the window of a car. Louv uses a multitude of images to remind his audience ¬¬ who are likely the same age as he is ¬¬ of their childhood experiences. Louv also uses personal anecdotes to promote the drastic differences between simple wholesome actions and the modern consumer culture. His use of rhetorical questions also helps the reader in his/her attempt to understand that, “people no longer consider the physical world worth watching.” Louv’s use of technically specific words like, “municipalities” helps him to qualify his statements. The use of rhetorical
Postmodernism it is a complicated term but it can also be interpreted as a set of ideas, it has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Defining Postmodernism initially can be problematic, because the concept itself relates to many academic disciplines including architecture, art, literature, film, communications, technology, and fashion. The term “postmodernism” emerged in the 1960’s to cope with and reflect the radical changes which have been projected on the nature of knowledge since World War 2. What characterizes the
Postmodernism movement which began in the 1950’s and still prevails today, is the successor of Modernism. Postmodernism, in contrast to Modernism, seeks to challenge authority as a whole, refutes any belief in absolute truths, regards hierarchal power as distrustful and seeks to establish an approach in
Aldous Huxley delivers a powerful warning to readers in the novel Brave New World, seriously challenging us to reassess our thinking on consumerism. This makes Brave New World a significant text because of its freaky predictions and the change it resultantly challenges us to make. Huxley purposefully uses a critique of how we live through exaggeration to perpetrate a reassessment of our thinking. We are made critically aware of our society's limitations and flaws through the critique of our current consumerist lifestyles to age, condition and artificial happiness. Through this Huxley has effectively forced us to change our thinking.
Postmodernism is a late twentieth century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism . It was an era set free from the past, it is distinguished by a general wariness of ideologies as well as a rather ' strenuous' relationship with what constitutes as art. This lead to new types of art such as instillation and performance.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
The consumerist supermarket place and its postmodern surroundings promote an unrealistic expectation of how an individual should behave and he struggles to meet them. The postmodern society in which he lives instils in him the notion that a truth-system of correspondences can order the arbitrary nature of reality. Relativism
When David Harvey asserts, “The right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights,” he presents a conundrum. One that insistently tells us that access to the city in order to create the type of utopian urban space is a fundamental right that must be shared amongst all people regardless of their social standing. He raises the proverbial question about ownership over urban space and the impact it has on those who live within it. Ideally, those who identify a geographical space as their home place typically claim proprietorship over it and often carry a sense of place-pride; gratification towards a city rooted in local cosmopolitanism that recognizes the city
In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...
Gehry’s additional design of the exterior has created an unconventional model form of house. The asymmetrical form characterizes the entire external side of the house. According to Goldstein, Gehry tried to slant the house roofline, create a false perspective and cause an absurd viewer’ perception or expectation (1979, 9). The complexity of the form might also produce a relationship with the house’s elements such as door, wall, and roof. For example, those elements, which linearly constructed, were hardly noticed since the distraction of geometric form around the exterior part of the house. It’s even barely hard to find the entrance of the house as a result of the salient angles of exterior.
Before postmodernism can be understood clearly a brief understanding of modernism needs to be contextualised and explained. The modernist movement started to form in the late 19th and early 20th century, some of the forming factors of modernism came from the rapid growth of the modern industrial societies and the horror that arose form World War I. Many modernists rejected enlightened thinking and gave up all religious beliefs (CITE). Some of the most important characteristics of the modern movement directly contradict the characteristics of postmodernism. After what happened in World War I the modernist started to reject the past with that in mind
Postmodernism is a style of art that first became popular in the late 20th century. When seeing the word postmodernism, it might have to do with any one medium of art-- literature, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Lyotard, a founder of postmodernism in philosophy, is quoted as saying, “Simplifying to the extreme, I define the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” By saying this, Lyotard simply meant that, as a postmodernist, he was against the ways of thinking of modernists and wanted to see something new philosophically and artistically. Postmodernity demonstrates a departure from the art style modernism.
The field on the corner of our road blew with unmown grass, pale yellow in the midst of summer. It greeted you as you drove up the road, into the suburb with old weatherboard houses converted to shops. On windy days, the grass billowed across the field in mesmerizing patterns, creating a spectacle for those walking past. Sometimes there were black cows scattered amongst it. It sat next to the creek with old gum trees leaning over; a lovely patch of countryside. Five years ago, they dug up the field to build a block of houses. The field became precise lines of concrete and trees planted in straight rows. The houses were made of brick and were placed with no regard for privacy. The drive into the suburb is changed, now the ideal suburban aesthetic