The Rabbit Hole

Depending on how deeply you look into my thesis it can appear to be contradictory to itself. I say that the novel is not an allegory but explain how through personifying the rabbits as themselves the readers are lead to believe that it is an allegory. Does that not, in essence, just make in an allegory?The answer is no and only through reading my essay could you receive a full explanation on the idea. For now, however, you only have my wonderful outline to look at.

Example: ” The novel has epic elements, which parallel those of other works, especially The Odyssey.” http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-8274%28198703%2976%3A3%3C56%3AHFOAYA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage Example: “Rabbits (say Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss” (p. 73).Example: “His animals share the faculties of language, hindsight, and foresight with human beings, and almost nothing else. They keep all their instincts and all their wildness: they just talk to each other.” http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/printed-books/watership-down-richard-adams/300280/Reason 2: Humans constantly kill animals and remove them from their homes in order to expand cities but in this instance it is sad to the reader because he is personifying the rabbit as himself.Example: “Some of the factors placing pressure on the rabbit population in general are…loss of habitat to building and succession of growth”http://www.hunting-directory.co.uk/beagle/rabbitstudy.html

Example: “They believed that the warrens represented human governments (a democracy and a dictatorship), with human-like religion (the sun god who is the creator of all things).” http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/search.cgi?title=watership+down Example: “All other elil do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.” (p. 151)Reason 3: Because the reader continues to personify the rabbits as people throughout the story he views it as an allegory.Example: “Let’s get one thing straight: Watership Down is not about rabbits. Anthropomorphic fiction, where animals and other beings are given human characteristics is always really about humans.” http://www.mayfieldiow.freewire.co.uk/watershp/wdwiab.htm

Example: “Adults will see that General Woundwort and his slave-warren Efrafra bear more than a passing resemblance to a military dictator (e.g. General Franco) and a slave-state (e.g. Sparta), and might even go so far as to start shifting uncomfortably in their armchairs and muttering “Allegory” to themselves under their breath.” http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/printed-books/watership-down-richard-adams/300280/Conclusion: Reword thesis…yadda yadda yadda…

No it isn’t a car, it’s New Criticism. 

Notes: 

-          Concentrates of text

-          Rejects all other attributes (morals, themes, history)

-          Mistaken for having fallacies:

            o        Affective: imputing own emotion into a work

            o        Intentional: assuming the authors intention (you have no way of knowing what an author thought about work)

-          T.S. Elliot: known for formation of “objective correlative”

-          OC = art should not be personal expression, but represent universal symbols.

-          Example: all nursery rhymes that do not offer morals

-          Semantic redundancy comes from morals, new criticism.

-          Words cannot have interpretations. They are what they are.

The beautiful version: PostModern Handout 

 The incase you don’t have Microsoft Word version…

A quick look at the disturbing world of postmodernism…

• Modernism: Cultural movement out of a Victorian intellect that was conservative/ constricted.
• Modernist ideas are viewed in the exact same way, like a straight line.
• Postmodernism: Uses the same subjective attitude as modernism but is clouded in intent, plays with meaning and incoherence.
• Think: Order, boundary & balance.
• A jagged line, postmodernism uses fragmented plots and many questions/considerations.
• Think: Chaos, irony & clutter.

 Jean-François Lyotard

 Metanarratives – large-scale theories and philosophies

 Micro-narratives – Small stories that explain a particular part of life

 Defines modernity as the age of metanarrative legitimation, and post modernity

 Views post modernity as an age of fragmentation and pluralism

 Work is characterized by a persistent opposition to universals, meta-narratives, and generality.

 To Lyotard, this is a question of both knowledge and power. Knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?

 With vast amounts of knowledge stored digitally in databases, who decides what knowledge is worth storing (what is legitimate knowledge) and who has access to these databases?

 Jean Baudrillard

 He breaks down modernity and post modernity in an effort to explain the world as a set of models.

 He states that we live in a world of images but images that are only simulations.

 We have lost contact with the “real” in various ways, that we have nothing left but a continuing fascination with its disappearance.

 His vision is dystopic, and one of supreme nihilism and melancholia.

 When reading his work on post modernity, one sometimes gets the sense that we have already lost.

 The fact that movies and television (the media) keep turning to history and to various “retro” recreations of the past is merely a symptom for the loss of history.

 ”Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea.”

 Baudrillard argues that the parodic, self-conscious and self-reflexive elements of pop-cultural forms only aid in their capitalist complicity  

• Jacques Derrida

 Much of his writing is concerned with the deconstruction of texts and probing the relationships of meaning between them.

 He proposes that it is incorrect to infer that anything reasoned can be used as a stable and timeless model.

 Much of his writing is virtually indecipherable, and meant to be so.  This is because his aim is to demonstrate the dynamic and endless play of meaning in language.

 Michel Foucault

 Known for studies in social institutions (psychiatry, medicine, human sciences, prison system) as well as work on human sexuality.

 Work on power, knowledge and discourse is widely discussed and is a foundation of postmodernism.

 His thoughts were complicated because they constantly changed overtime.

 Knowledge should transform the self.

 Thinks that what most people see as permanent truths in society are in actuality, change. This upsets the conventional understanding of history.

 Key Elements

 Irony: Silly word plays within the serious context.

  Pastiche: Multiple styles/elements pasted together to homage/parody styles.

 Metafiction: A fictionalization of historical events, disregard for the suspension of ones disbelief, and narrative shift/comments by the author.

 Maximalism: Widely criticised, disorganized language play and elaboration of detail for the sake of language play.

 Temporal Distortion: Fragmented/non-linear narratives.

 Hyper reality: Inability to distinguish from reality.

 Paranoia: belief that there is an ordering system behind chaos.

• Example Analysis

 p. 125 “An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, “There they go, there they go.” He meant his brains.
That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”

 §Two narratives one personal (about Vonnegut’s experience writing a book about the worst moments in his life) and one is impersonal (story of Billy pilgrim) making the narratives non-linear.

 p. 1. “All this happened, more or less.”

 §The author is disturbing the sense of belief by stating that his work is fiction (Metafiction).