Analysis #5

The Stranger by Adrienne Rich

Looking as I’ve always looked before, straight down the heart

Of the street to the river

Walking the river of the avenues

Feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

Watching the lights turn on in the towers

Walking as I’ve always walked before

Like a man, like a woman, in the city

My visionary anger cleansing my sight

And the detailed perceptions of mercy

Flowering from that anger

If I come home into a room out of a sharp misty light

And hear them talking a dead language

If they ask me my identity

What can I say but

I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

In your dead language

In the lost noun, the verb surviving

Only in the infinite

The letters of my name are written under the lids

Of the newborn child

Analysis (Postmodern)

Postmodernism is a movement away from the modern.

      The narrator is within a city where people sit around and talk, this implies a modern environment/push for the new. However the narrator looks past the city to nature and envisions a new world where nature is infused with progress. She looks as before (a citizen) but she has developed a suspicious eye against the global cultural narrative or meta narrative. She is breaking away and becoming something new and in doing so sees those who are obsessed with the ideology of “new” as dead/outdated.

       Reality is a social construct and thus social structures, institutions, gender constructions, and the formation of language are all creations related to power and motivation. The narrator seeks to separate herself from the urban machine, social groups, gender identity, and the repressive nature of language.

The narrator speaks of a child (postmodernism) who sees her name and thus her true self. In a postmodern society she can be seen as an individual without classification. 

Jean-Francois Lyotard and Postmodernism

The demise of grand narratives!

       General human emancipation could not be attained by way of human rights or a one class society.

Modernism in the arts sought to make everything new/to transform the world. However, after the events of Auschwitz and the Soviet gulags we realized that modern dreams of transforming humanity only is and perhaps only can be attained through violence and thus success is futile.

An affinity for the “new” and the universal creates hostility towards the “other” and the “old.” This creates a social disconnect.

       Lyotard then, through postmodernism (a turning away from the utopian ideal) appreciates and encourages diversity, difference, and plurality within the human experience. There is no longer (in theory) a superior (I.E. more progressive and modern outlook) and thus one should not aspire to a mono-outlook. Progress does not equal better. 

History is not a linear universal and should not be made to be.

This is not to say that progress is a bad thing, rather that we must strive to not see it as a universal good.

Issues with this: Passivity of Lyotards position/Inability to judge differences creates an “everything is ok” absence of standards. How then do we look to and dream of a future that is better than the status quo?

Postmodernism: Trying to shake modernism as modernism in an attempt to shake the past only succeeded in repeating it, thus, postmodernism seeks to work through the past in order to overcome it.