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Officiële naam: Butler, Ian Christopher
Geboortedatum: 1940
Overlijdensdatum: 2020
Geslacht: male
Nationaliteit: UK
Land (voor op de kaart): UK
Plaats van overlijden: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Oorzaak van overlijden: heart failure
Beroepen: English Language and Literature professor, Christ Church College, University of Oxford

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Modernism : a very short introduction door Christopher Butler

Not the best introduction, as the book results in a fragmented collection of short essays not completely liked one to the other (and not complemented by a solid image repository).

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d.v. | 1 andere bespreking | May 16, 2023 |

Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction door Christopher Butler

Starts out as a critique, and inserts the "introduction" part towards the middle, then goes back to talking about how useless and silly it all is. While attempting to be informative, the author also ends up sounding whiny, not to mention that he spends a lot of time on Foucault (more than half of it enumerating his and Derrida's flaws) without discussing the differences between postmodernism and poststructuralism.

Take this for an example of the author lashing out: "Postmodernists are by and large pessimists, many of them haunted by lost Marxist revolutionary hopes, and the beliefs and the art they inspire are often negative rather than constructive." This statement is presented as irrefutable fact, despite being highly flawed and incomplete.

This "very short" introduction could have been shorter without all the complaining, which I think makes this book a hard sell, or maybe an irresponsible and mostly one-sided one, if it is truly meant to be an introduction.
… (meer)

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irrelephant | 6 andere besprekingen | Feb 21, 2021 |

Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

My recent reading of Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt was a reminder of how much literature has changed in the years since I first began reading adult literature. I can’t think of anything that I read from my parents’ bookshelves that was a blend of fiction and non-fiction, nor can I ever remember then discussing the idea of truth in books being a relative concept. Books were unambiguously fiction or NF, and librarians did not have to struggle with which section of the shelves to put it in. Yet now, after almost a decade of blogging my reading here at ANZ LitLovers, I have become used to, and comfortable with, all kinds of what I now recognise as postmodernist aspects of literature. So although I’ve dabbled in Postmodernism before, now seems like a good time to investigate Christopher Butler’s Postmodernism, a Very Short Introduction and also Introducing Postmodernism, a Graphic Guide by Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt.
Starting with Christopher Butler’s VSI (because I’ve read his Modernism before and found it illuminating) I see that the chapters are:
The rise of postmodernism
New ways of seeing the world
Politics and identity
The culture of postmodernism
The ‘postmodern condition’.
Chapter 1 begins by talking about the hostile reception to postmodernist art, specifically Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966). Searching for an image of it, I found a contemporary example of the 1966 reaction – with which I have some sympathy, when it comes to the visual arts. Butler acknowledges this:

Now enshrined in the Tate Modern, it doesn’t resemble much in the canon of modernist sculpture. It is not formally complex or expressive, or particularly engaging to look at, indeed it can soon be boring. It is easy to repeat. Lacking any features to sustain interest in itself (except perhaps to Pythagorean number mystics) it inspires us to ask questions about its context rather than its content: ‘What is the point of this?’ or ‘Why is this displayed in a museum?’ Some theory about the work has to be brought in to fill the vacuum of interest, and this is also fairly typical. It might inspire the question, ‘Is it really art, or just a pile of bricks pretending to be art?’ But this is not a question that makes much sense in the postmodern era, in which it seems to be generally accepted that it is the institution of the gallery, rather than anything else, which has made it, de facto, a ‘work of art’. The visual arts are just what museum curators show us, from Picasso to sliced -up cows, and it is up to us to keep up with the ideas surrounding these works. (p.1)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/11/23/postmodernism-a-very-short-introduction-by-c...… (meer)

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anzlitlovers | 6 andere besprekingen | Nov 23, 2017 |

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction door Christopher Butler

Christina Stead Week is a very good week to explore modernism, and so you can just imagine how pleased I was when The Spouse staggered home from the post office with a great big box full of Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press. LOL I am hoping to develop a whole new level of expertise here at ANZ LitLovers now that I have this mini library of Very Short Introductions to
•Modernism
•Postmodernism
•Existentialism
•Contemporary Fiction
•Literature: Chinese; Spanish; German; French; Russian and Italian;
•Goethe
•the New Testament; and
•Film.

modernism-a-very-short-introductionSo, to Modernism, A Very Short Introduction first of all, because Christina Stead is a great modernist and most of us could use a little help in understanding her work. Alas, she does not get a mention in this little book of only 102 pages, so you will have to make do with my interpretations and extrapolations…

Nevertheless, Christopher Butler endeared himself to me immediately by choosing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) as the text to exemplify modernism in literature. (To fit with his unifying motif of the city, he chose Fernand Leger’s La Ville (1919) to exemplify modernist painting; and The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Bertolt Brecht to exemplify a musical example). He begins by telling us that modernism is not just about modernity, that is, in the period 1909 to 1939

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/17/modernism-a-very-short-introduction-by-chris...… (meer)

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anzlitlovers | 1 andere bespreking | Nov 16, 2016 |

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