1. World Literature II
Renaissance to the Present
Dr. Michael Broder
University of South Carolina
April 19, 2012

2. Late
The ^Twentieth Century
POSTMODERNISM

3. “Half-suffocated summer gods
grope in the sea mist.”
Tomas Tranströmer
“Evening—Morning”

4. Edgar Varèse (1883 – 1965)

5. The Holocaust, 1933-1945

6. German invasion of Poland,
September 1939

7. German “Blitz” of Britain and Northern
Ireland, September 1940 – May 1941

8. Japanese attack on US naval base in
Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

9. Liberation of the camps, 1944-45

10. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (1945)

11. “No poetry after Auschwitz”
T.W. Adorno (1903 – 1969), German
sociologist, philosopher, musicologist
and composer

12. Jackson Pollock
Shimmering Substance (1946)

13. John Cage (1912 – 1992)

14. Berlin Blockade & Airlift, 1948-49

15. Jasper Johns
Flag (1954-5)

16. East German border guard Conrad Schumann leaps into
the French Sector of West Berlin over barbed wire on
August 15, 1961.

17. Andy Warhol
Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)

18. Vietnam War, 1955-1975

19. Tom Wesselmann
Still Life #20 (1962)

20. Buddhist monk burns himself on a Saigon street to protest
persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government
(1963)

21. James Rosenquist
President Elect (1960-1, 1964)

22. Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon
Police Chief, 1968

23. Roy Lichtenstein
Whaam! (1963)

24. Paris, May 1968
• Massive confrontations
between police and
students brought workers
out on a general strike
and brought the
government to the point
of collapse
• Clashes followed
between police and
students on countries all
around the world, and
would have a lasting
political impact

25. Jean-Luc Godard
La Chinoise (1967)

26. Apollo 11 lands on the moon, 1969

27. Girl running down a road after a South
Vietnamese napalm attack, 1972

28. The Polish trade union Solidarity emerged on
August 31, 1980 at the Gdańsk Shipyard under the
leadership of Lech Lech Wałęsa

29. Jean-Michel Basquiat
Mona Lisa (1983)

30. President Reagan speaking in front of the
Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall, June 12, 1987

31. David Hockney
Pearblossom Highway (1986)

32. On the 9th of November, 1989, the Border
separating Western from Eastern Germany was
effectively opened.

33. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980)
• Being and Nothingness
(1943)
• Existentialism
• Existence precedes
essence
• That is, you are a
material body before
you are a thinking,
feeling person

34. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009)
• Structuralism
• The human mind is
structured according to
binary oppositions like
male/female, high/low,
raw/cooked
• The members of the binary
are defined in terms of
each other
• All of these binaries for a
structure, each part of
which is defined in terms
of every other part

35. Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
• Critiqued Enlightenment
concepts of freedom,
liberation, self-determination
as socially constructed rather than
natural
• Focused on the ways in which
such constructs can foster
cultural hegemony, violence
and exclusion
• That is, those in power get to
determine what human nature
is and who gets to be
classified as “human” (as well
as who does not)

36. Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004)
• Deconstruction
• The binary oppositions of
structuralism are inherently
instable
• The privileged pole of the
binary requires the
devalued pole of the binary
for its own definition
• The devalued pole of the
binary presents a constant
threat to the centrality of
the privileged pole

37. The Civil Rights Movement
Resisted oppression on the basis of RACE

38. The Feminist Movement
Resisted oppression on the basis of GENDER

39. The Gay Rights Movement
Resisted oppression on the basis of SEXUALITY

40. The Postcolonial Movement
Fought for the independence of colonies and
the end of IMPERIALISM

41. I dreamt that I was to start school but arrived late.
Everyone in the room wore white masks on their faces.
It was impossibe to know which was the teacher.
Tomas Tranströmer
“Grief Gondola #2”

42. World Literature II
Renaissance to the Present
Dr. Michael Broder
University of South Carolina
April 19, 2012