= one of the main points of the lecture

• Preliminary Class Business
• Review of main conclusions from last lecture
• A Reading of William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
• Postmodern Art
• References

Preliminary Class Business

• Informational talk by person from Instructional Computing

A Reading of William Gibson's "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" (1992)

• Review of main conclusions from last lecture:
  
  
  • Who am I? (A self that is external and discontinuous) (cf., Georges Poulet on the old problem of Cartesian temporality)
    
    
  • Who am I as a writer? (An author whose inspiration is a "mechanism" like a camera taking pictures or a timer in a traffic light
    
    
  • What is writing? (A media form like other modern media: external, discontinuous, random-access)
    
    
  • In sum: I/writer/writing is like the physical form of Agrippa

A Reading of William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey" (1798)

• Biographical and compositional circumstances of poem (map of UK):
  
           1793 1798
  
  

  "No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part written down till I reached Bristol."

  
  
• A poem that helped established the paradigm for secular confessional autobiography (lines 1-50)
  
  
• Who am I? Who am I as a Writer?
  
  
  • I am a discontinuous self whose power and vision come from imaginative "spots of time" (ll. 35-50, cf., "the hermit"). I am an external self whose vision comes from "nature" (ll. 65 ff.).
    
    
  • The visionariness of "spots of time" and nature are at once the source of my greatest poetry and my greatest risk (my inhumanity).
    
    
  • "Memory" + "Imagination" and "Memory" + "Nature" are therefore the poet's formulae for his mature inspiration:
    • Memory + Imagination heals discontinuity (ll. 1 ff., 58 ff.)
    • Memory + Nature sutures together external and internal experience (landscapes of connectivity in ll. 4-35)
      
      
• What is Writing?
  
  
  • The poet's argument of memory is supported by embedding writing and vision within the older, communal media world of orality and hearing (ll. 1-4, 43-49, 88-93; the turn to his sister at poem's end, ll. 111-19, 141-42)
    
    
  • This is the poet's model of "information" (ll. 119-35)
    
    
• In sum: I/writer/writing is like the physical form of Tintern Abbey: [image site 1] [image site 2] [image site 3]

Postmodern Art

• Renée (pseud.), Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, with analytic interpretation by Marguerite Séchehaye; translated by Grace Rubin-Rabson (New York: New American Library, 1970, c1951) — as quoted in Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," p. 120:

  I remember very well the day it happened. We were staying in the country and I had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later—a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school and the children's song were apart from the rest of the world. At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see. The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks, filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran home to our garden and began to play "to make things seem as they usually were," that is, to return to reality. It was the first appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations of unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things.

  
  
  • Unjustified, unexplained irruption of a "strange feeling" (compare Wordsworth's "blessed mood")
    
    
  • A landscape that reinforces the feeling of discontinuity:
    • Isolation in an "instant" of time and "prison" of space
    • Discontinuity with the "yellow vastness" of the field of wheat
      
      
  • She can only return to a seamless reality by "playing" at it or simulating it
    
    
    
• Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles: [image site 1] [image site 2] [image site 3] [image site 4]
  
  
• Frank Gehry House, Santa Monica — Images: A B C D E
  
  
• Compare, once more, the physical form of Agrippa
  
  
• The "postmodern" world of information culture is like "pastiche" and "schizophrenia" (like Jameson's examples, like Gibson's "Agrippa"):
  • Random-access space and time (RAM, "random-access memory")
  • Synthesis created ad hoc by a "mechanism" that is "out there" separated by an "interface" from inner experience
    
    
• What is the role of art in such a world?

• Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1956)
• Renée (pseud.), Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, with analytic interpretation by Marguerite Séchehaye; translated by Grace Rubin-Rabson (New York: New American Library, 1970, c1951)

Supplementary links for this class on Study Materials page