Blog 10

Using 3-4 quotations from Rushdie's Wizard Of Oz, tell how he would interpretation this video of Indian children singing a song from the American film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5svfS_bnc

I think Rushdie would say that the video exemplifies the vivid and realistic fantasy world of The Wizard of Oz -- he speaks of its "realistic surreality" (Rushdie 27). The children are fully absorbed in this world...smiling, carrying on with their pantomimes of real behaviors, which probably seem quite real to them. As Rushdie says of Oz, it "finally became home" (Rushdie 57). This is also consistent with the fantasy-filled Bollywood cinema Rushdie recall that these children have likely been exposed to: "'We are all dancing out our stories," (Rushdie 11), as Rushdie quotes a Bollywood director.

The video also captures the pure happiness of some of the best parts of The Wizard of Oz, what Rushdie calls the "pure, effortless and somehow inevitable felicity," which he observes is as near as possible to an "authorless text" in its seeming inevitability -- perhaps reflected in the video by the absence of any director, or any adult (Rushdie 16). Consisting only of happy children capably performing their routines, the video would remind Rushdie of what he calls the "driving force" of the film: "the inadequacy of adults" (Rushdie 10), reflected in Dorothy's taking charge of her own life, the delight of the Munchkins and the weakness of both her adult caretakers in Kansas and the exposed wizard.

Rushdie could also not help but comment on the children's skipping, an imitation of Dorothy's skipping down the yellow brick broad which he admires and states is the "clever, shuffling little skip that will be the leitmotif of the entire journey," representing Dorothy's -- and perhaps the children's -- "steps out along the road of destiny" (Rushdie 44).

Blog 9

What would Fredric Jameson say about the following image:
http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/images/mona-lisa-on-the-simpsons1.jpg

Jameson would say that this picture of an older Lisa Simpson substituting for the woman in the classical Mona Lisa painting is a perfect example of postmodernism. It makes fun of classic 'high culture', merging it with popular culture and thereby elevating popular culture, as here represented by a female member of of a dysfunctional, working class, TV family. In Jameson's words, the picture can be said to represent 'the effacement...of the older...frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms...and contents of that very culture industry [TV, for example] so passionatelely denounced by all the ideologues of the modern..." (Jameson 2). Artworks like the Mona Lisa that have been considered high art are now viewed "as a set of dead classics" (Jameson 4). Jameson goes on to say that while this sort of postmodernism and "complacent (yet delilrious) camp-following celebration...is surely unacceptable" -- at some level we still emotionally reject the degradation of a classic work of art -- we must still "reject moralising condemnations of the postmodern "when it's compared with the equally ridiculous 'high seriousness' of the great modernisms'" (Jameson 6). The postmodern challenges our conceptions, and while it may sometimes make us uncomfortable, we also realize (and laugh at) the truth in that challenge.
Jameson might also observe that this picture is postmodern because it puts on display for both admiration and ridicule a TV example of the latest and most current form of capitalism: an ugly, homogenized city like the Springfield of The Simpsons, with its visible and generic 'Bowlarama', and the Simpson family, who spend their time trapped in American working class conditions and roles as they watch TV, drink (Homer, at least), fight with each other and scheme for a way out of their social and economic constraints.