And Now for Something Completely Different: Section Prompt Nov. 20

Hello all!

Please come to section this week ready to discuss Caldwell’s Trash TV article. With regards to my questions below, please be ready to provide page numbers referencing your answers or places you have questions about to go into the text. This will help us keep the conversation moving so we also have time to talk about editing your papers at the end of section. 

1. How does Caldwell define postmodernism? (hints: modernism and postmodernism not being set up as a dichotomy, spectacle, specularity, empty signs/signifiers, pastiche)
2. How does Pee-Wee’s Playhouse have an oppositional look and mainstream attitude according to Caldwell? 
3. How does Pee-Wee’s Playhouse work through social issues as a process of stylization and conflate the social into the psychological (hint: page 211-onward). 

Here are key terms/lists that Caldwell includes that will help you answer these questions. In a class I took on postmodernism and performance with Dr. EJ Westlake in the theatre department (shout out!) I learned that the best way to learn PoMo anything is to enact it, so in our discussion we will go to the terms from this list that people are drawn towards, and use them to link to others in whatever random chain our discussion follows. It may feel chaotic, but it will help us practice the theory that’s being discussed. Each list has the term that Caldwell uses, then one key phrase I picked out that helps explain that term. (Also, you can use this chart as a study guide for this dense article down the road!)

(Radical) Modernist Forms	PoMo Ideologies and Styles	Stylization and Conflating the Social and Psychological
Narrative intransivity (textual fragmentation)	Reality into Images (world as pictures)	Interior vs. exterior (home as psychological barrier)
Estrangement (objectification)	Perpetual presents (temporal and atemporal oddity)	Extreme specularity (primacy of visual, ways of watching/spectatorship)
Foregrounding (form over content)	Pastiche (retrostyled blank/empty parody with historical amnesia)	Extremely mediated communications (distancing)
Multiple diegesis (subplots with multiple narrators)	Schizophrenia (incoherent signifiers)	Reversals of Race, Class, Gender (ambiguity, perpetual anxiety)
Aperture (irresolution and openness)		Commodities, consumption (celebration of consumption, learning to be a good consumer)
Displeasure (pain and art)		Pee-Wee as Recombitant Bricoleur (bricolage, repurposing items to have endless meanings)
Reality (direct address)		Site of extreme intertextuality (characteristics of other media/arts inside the TV text)
		Social-to-Psychological: Pee-Wee as Therapeutic Discourse (forever socially alienated, constant escape/retreat)

I know this is a lot of information: don’t freak out! This article is dense, and you don’t have to master it! The key to reading theory well is to engage with it, ask questions, have a conversation, and take from it what you can! See if you can feel confident about one or two key concepts, then let it rest until section. 

See you Wednesday, and happy writing!

Josh

PS: I have posted my writing tips powerpoint on CTools for you to look at if you like. It includes the diagram for the research and writing process that I talked about last week.

PPS: And now for something completely different:

PPPS: The larch.