Lecture Notes - Exam Revision

So, it's that time of year again - exam revision. Hopefully these notes can help you understand Chris' lecture a bit better, or just give you some additional information that you might not have picked up during the lecture.

Here goes.

The first topic discussed; whether or not Nietzsche was a Nazi. Due to the fact that Nietzsche was already dead when Hitler and the Nazi movements were active, you could not really say that he was a Nazi.

But why is it then said that he was a Nazi?

Even though the Nazi movements didn't start until 30 years after Nietzsche died, anti semitism was already widely spread over Europe - Germany, Poland, Russia - but not necessarily in the form of hatred of Jews. Nietzsche does not like any kinds of religion, it's a bad thing, and he says that people needs to eradicate religion from their lives to become free. Due to him being such an enemy towards religious people and religion itself, plus his famous statement 'God is dead', Christians tend to say that Nietzsche is a Nazi - they don't like him, and he doesn't like them.

Nietzsche's main philosophies contain all the elements of (extreme) individualism, which can be easily found in his book 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (Humanity must be overcome!) where we find a Superman - some sort of übermensch and untermensch like in the German Nazi movements, which is thought to have been taken from Nietszche's philosophy, but not necessarily meant the same thing. Maybe Nietzsche was the total opposite to a Nazi by being a complete individual and not subsiding his own individual ideas... Maybe he is misunderstood by authoritarian organisations, the church and such as a Nazi?

Conclusion from Horrie was that there is no right or wrong, yes or no - judge for yourself. Was Nietzsche a Nazi?

Other famous people who Nietzsche referred to as super people/supermen were for example Da Vinci, Beethoven and Wagner.

More info about Nietzsche:

Mentally disorientated and unselfish

Zarathustra has once again spoken
God is dead - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Further on we discussed existentialism (1940s until early 1960s), especially from the point of view of Albert Camus and his novel 'the Stranger'. Existentialism is quite a tricky -ism to pin down. Existentialism kind of means that you live now, right now. Yesterday is history, and history is like fantasy, fiction. No one knows anything about the future and therefore it may not happen, it's not there. (Existence precedes essence - Jean Paul Sartre).

Like in the book, existentialists say there is no purpose of life, life is temporary, brief and it has no value cause you are going to die anyway. You might even take it one step further and consider suicide - but then it takes an effort to commit suicide and is it really worth that seeing as it doesn't mean anything whether you are alive or dead... cause everything is pointless. This is usually referred to as Existentialism Void.

In the book, our main character Meursault commits a crime, kills another person. Earlier on his mother has died. Even though both these actions should have affected Meursault's feelings, it didn't and because of this Meursault ended up in prison... (See previous blog)

From a journalistic point of view this book is written kind of in the way that we journalists are getting taught how to write news stories. Short, simple sentences where the subject is followed by the verb in a 'crunchy kind of bored observational way'.

More info about The Stranger and Albert Camus:

Emotionally Detached?

After this subject the discussion moved on to more contemporary, new journalism and focusing on how our history and past have come to shape today's style of journalism into something that is more comparable to a novel, a 'story' than a raw fact news piece. An article today, so called a story, is similar to a non-fiction novel. This intellectual trend seemed to move towards presenting news as fiction - even though the people in the stories are very much real. Tom Wolfe was one of the journalists that highlighted this so called new journalism more than many others, and in his work 'The New Journalism' he shows on different examples of new journalism, such as gonzo journalism, through an anthology of articles. Wolfe's big heroes that inspired him were among others Emile Zola and Charles Dickens, as he we can see traces of within the new journalism as Wolfe uses methods of 19th century literature.

New journalism focuses on being subjective whereas 'old' journalism smacks up the facts in a quite boring linear way of presenting the news - objective. With the movement from 'old' journalism, the storytelling went from being digetic (telling) to being mimetic (seeing). Gonzo and fly on the wall journalism is definitely related to the mimetic side of journalism, aka new journalism.

• Throughout this period existentialism (Camus) becomes the 'normal thing' in society and writing, the norm.


• Psychoanalysis (Freud, Century of the Self) becomes popular and its all about listening to people and analyse them. This is in clinical terms regarded as rubbish, but in literature - brilliant! With psychoanalysis you can get close to someone and make them open up to you by following them around (gonzo). News is news, the Freudian way of approaching news is the opposite.


• ME-generation! Everyone should be happy! This movement in New Journalism is a total individualism movement (Nietzsche). If it feels good - Do It! (Nike). All about self fulfilment, sexual freedom and pleasure - even if it leads to STDs or babies it doesn't matter, as long as it's a pleasure. Hippies, drugs...

Wilhelm Reich, extremist sexual freedom, mentions that you become physically ill if you don't have pleasure sex all the time.

More information on Wilhelm Reich:
Proper orgasms to the people!!

After this movement, something called the Vienna Circle followed and the followers of this listened to Moritz Schlick and they rejected all philosophy, such as metaphysics, nations, classes, abstractions and so on, and relied only on science. Their main point was, if you cannot verify a proposition individually - then you can't trust it, cause you cannot verify it. They would never say that something can not be true, instead they would say 'it could be true, but we can't verify it'. This is called the Verification Principle.

As for example in religion; Nietzsche said: 'God is dead'. The Verification Principle would not accept this cause they cannot verify what he is saying is true. Therefore, they stay open minded about God and decide not discuss it cause there is no answer- this statement cannot be tested and therefore not individually verified as right or wrong. The things that this movement discussed were only things that can be verified.

This sort of applies to journalism today as well. You need to be certain of something before you publish it for it to be a fact, you need to be able to verify every separate fact and make sure it is accurate. If not, that is if not able to verify that that certain something to be a fact, it is comment (bollocks) and therefore not mentionable for a journalist in a news piece as news is fact, not comment.

Verifiable = fact (such as spelling)
Non verifiable = comment (religion)

Religion, poetry, metaphysics and so on are all non verifiable propositions - therefore not discussed by the Vienna Circle. (Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by this group.)

Faults
Karl Popper died in the 1990s and was one of the biggest philosophers in the world. He was against this verification principle because he said that this verification principle cannot verify itself whether it is right or wrong - falsification principle. Popper destroyed the verificationists with this argument. He argued that things are only true if the opposite is also true. If you cannot do the opposite, the proposition cannot be true in itself.

According to this theory Freud, Marx and Hegel's philosophies were all destroyed due to not being able to verify their theories.

Last but not least we discussed John Maynard Keynes (1930s) and his approach on the economical climate. He rejects all economic theories of that time such as free market. Steinbeck claims that unemployment is impossible in a free market system. Today the situation is that the government gives benefit to unemployed people in society, therefore they won't go back to work - they will stay on benefits. Instead, get them working (even if it digging holes and then filling them back up) for them to get a salary and then being able to spend money and get a circle of economy flowing. "Capitalism produces nothing except destruction for themselves."

Cut wages + remove social spending = cures unemployment.

Even if your wages get cut you have to keep spending, cause when you keep spending the company will be able to keep their employers, and within time being able to emply even more people and eventually wages can go up again and things return to somewhat 'normal' - but if you start cutting your spendings the employees at that same company might have to go due to under spendings and not enough money in circulation. Therefore expand and spend your way out of trouble. (More information in Hayek's book Road to Serfdom.)

HCJ Year 2 - Synopsis Notes for Test

Alright, quite a lot of information in one lecture, but I've done my best to simplify my notes... Here goes;

James Joyce - Ulysses

James Joyce is described as an icon for Modernism (1880-World War 1). In Ulysses, Joyce describes the fragmentation of the society through his main characters. He ventures in to people's minds and tries to describe how human beings have diverse ways of looking and experience things, and therefore can experience the same event or thought with different views on it at the same time, which of course helps making this book even more confusing.

Joyce's style of writing, stream of consciousness, is a very confusing (most of this book I found extremely confusing) way of writing, and therefore it seems as if nothing really makes sense in the book, and sometimes, I'm not even sure the characters themselves know what they do, feel or think. Joyce breaks free from previous, conservative trends and ideas within literature and instead of relying on the previous narrative styles that consists of a beginning, middle and an end, his writing jumps all over the place - just like yours and my mind works in our daily life. With this writing style, the narrative ends up very decentred, and there is no single story, but many stories that overlap one another and never really reveals anything - because nothing seems to be definite.

Many of the feelings and experiences that are being described have close connection with Freud, such as when Molly Bloom considers her previous love affairs as 'experiences', and not as something that stays close to her heart. This work includes things that could be seen (and was seen) as pornographic and perverse, and was therefore banned. This also show indications on the Freudian way of considering things in life, as in 'humans have sex and therefore we should write about it', just as we write about everything else that happens around us.

Sigmund Freud

Freud was a sexist! He said that humans are motivated by sex, and it's a basic need, a basic instinct. He explained that this helped understanding how people thought, basically: no sex = no motivation. Freud described how people are not what they think they are because the society suppresses the individual and therefore it damages the individual - since sex, and orgasms, are basic needs (in Freudian terms) just like hunger and anger, a human being cannot survive without it - and as the society chooses to suppress these feelings, these needs the human becomes depressed and mentally ill.

But not everything seems to be about sex when talking about Freud. One of his most famous works is 'On the analysis of dreams', and this was the other major area in which he was interested in. Freud describes the human mind as consisting of a conscious and a subconscious part where the two opposites always exist in a constant conflict which leads to unhappiness. To find out how the conflict between the two can be solved, Freud concentrated on dreams as he described being the royal way to the subconscious. Because, through discussing dreams Freud said that you can find out what feelings, emotions, thoughts and needs are being suppressed in your body/mind and what can be done to change this.

Mainly Freud treated people with paranoia, different types of phobias, hysteria, fears and similar 'illnesses'. He is also famous for the concept penis envy where he describes all women being jealous on men and wanting to become one... [Silly thoughts... Lol!] But as we can see, a very common subject keeps repeating itself when it comes to Freud - sex.

George Orwell - 1984

In this book George Orwell describes how the government tries to control their citizens through language. For example, if they remove the word rebellion from the vocabulary, it cannot be used and therefore the action in itself will stop existing, and in this way the government can control their population to think and act in the ways they want.

1984 tells the story of how Winston Smith makes a living on censoring newspapers and erasing the past that the government does not want anyone to remember, this to be able to control the present and therefore also the future. "He who controls the present, controls the past - he who controls the past, controls the future" - so he is assigned to destroy the past to help the government control the future... Very shocking and something that is very scary and could probably happen in countries where no communication with other countries is allowed.

They produce a new dictionary with words that should be allowed and used, newspeak, and words change meaning such as 'love is hate' and 'peace is war', and the expression 'thought crime is death' occurs, which means that anyone thinking their own thoughts and trying to explore 'words' and 'actions' that are not within the dictionary will meet death in one way or another by simply just disappearing all of a sudden...

This can in some ways be linked with today's society where The Ministry of Defence (earlier called the Ministry of War) does not really deal in defence - more likely in the opposite...

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

This is a very extreme and controversial piece of work which is considered being a journalistic piece; some consider it propaganda, others as a journalistic campaign. John Steinbeck was the first, and only journalist so far, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Steinbeck based this book , The Grapes of Wrath, on a number of articles that he wrote as he lived and travelled with citizens of the United States that struggled through the great depression and left their homes, to find new opportunities and a new future in the promised land; California. The unfair and inhuman conditions that Steinbeck describes in the book was commented as exaggerated by some of the readers, but research shows that conditions were actually even worse during this time than he did describe. All the characters in the book are fictitious but do represent the majority of the people living and working under this period in time, and I think this is what makes the piece so vivid and strong.

The key narrative in this book focuses on migration (and the resistance to) - and this will always be a subject to discuss no matter when, even most likely in 200 years, because every generation, and every culture has its own migration story. From what I have read and heard about this book, and its author, it seems as if the main message that it wants to put through to fellow human beings living now is to cooperate and help each other. To work together and through these ways reach the best society possible - Socialism.

The book is written in a very descriptive way and you can feel yourself being there with the characters, suffering with them and sharing their daily hardness to battle the terrible conditions and tests they face throughout their journey. The dialogues are very colourful and intense (like our tutor Brian Thornton said; "fantastic!") and nails the characters in a way that I have not really seen before. Also, the book gives a voice to the voiceless, the powerless and the ones ignored and through this it can definitely be considered a journalistic (master) piece. This was of writing, visual writing, is closely connected with photojournalism that started to grow stronger during this period.

Emile Zola - Germinal

Just as Steinbeck's works, this is a very descriptive book that paints images in front of you, that adds colour, landscapes and portraits as you read along without seeing a single painting or photo throughout the entire book. Emile Zola is considered one of the first big photojournalists, and also the greatest Realism writer ever. He wrote books about prostitution in Paris, railway industries and so on, but his most regarded work is Germinal that describes a mining community where the citizens decides to strike only to find out that this move does not go the way they expected it.

Germinal is a brilliant book that makes me shiver every time I think about the well described parts of the shop keeper in the town being castrated by the angry citizens and the attempt to survive the flooded mine as it collapses and the only way out is up a rusty old metal ladder that cuts through their hands... This book could be seen as edging towards Modernism (body centred, pain etcetera) but is definitely classified as Realistic. Moreover, this work features women strongly as the sex that keeps the society up on its feet for as long as possible even though the conditions are absolutely inhuman.

I hope someone will find this useful!