Culture, Science, and Technology, 1900 to Present Flashcards
~Modern period
● Considiered in cultural and intelletual terms to have lasted roughly from the 1870s through the 1940s
~Contemporary era/postmodern era
● Characterized by even more unpredictability, relativism, and unconventionality than before
● The notion of an artistic and literary canon (a universally agreed-upon body of great works) has been called into doubt by postmodern thinking, in keeping with its rejection fo the notion that objective truth exists
~Multiculturalism
● The interaction and fusion of hte world’s various ethnic, artistic, and intellectual traditions
~Mass media technology
● Their exuberancea nd energy contrasted with the anxiety and uncertainty expressed by most high art
● Radio, film, teleision and the inexpensive production of books brought music, drama, literature and information into the lives of a greater variety of people
~Information/digital revolution
● Caused by computer
● Has vastly altered life in the 1990s and beyond
~High art (West)
● Characterized by bold experimentation and the distortion, even abandonment, of traditional norms and conventions
~Western art (first half of the 1900s)
● Marked by uncertainty and pessimism
● Despair caused by WWI brought an ever greater sense of anxiety tot he cultural forefront
● Europe’s political and economic comedown and the unsettling philosophical implications of recent scientific insights deepened the gloom during the interwar period
~All Quiet on the Western Front
● Eloquent accounts of the wartime experience
● By Erich Maria Remarque
● Describes the dehumanizing effects of hte trench warfare
~War poets
● Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Owen, and others
● Questioned traditional patriotism as an adequate justification for the midless butchery caused by the war
~Dada movement
● Avant-garde artists
● Exhibited in Europe and New York during the war
● Used shock and abusurdism, both to push the boundaires of what should be considered art and to highlight the irrationality of WWI, which they opposed
● “Fountain”: the bowl of a urinal irrevenrently turned into a sculpture by Frenchman Marcel Duchamp
~Sigmund Freud
● Called into question whether anything was fully knowable or whether any objective truths or standards existed
~The Decline of hte West
● Nonfiction book in interwar Europe
● By philospher Oswald Spengler
~T.S. Elliot and Franz Kafka
● Their prose and poetry dealt with dehumanization in an industrialized, bureaucratized era
~Stream-of-consciousness prose
● Virginia Woolfe, Marcel Proust and James Joyce
● Attempted to capture, almost in Freudian style, the workings of the human mind on the witten page
~Abstract painters
● Such as Pablo Picasso
● Distorted reality to demonstrate that things could be seen from a variety of perspective
~Surrealists
● Like Salvador Dali
● Placed realistic objects in unrealistic situations to confuse the viewer’s sense of reality
~Existentialism
● Rose to prominence after WWII
● Championed by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and hte French philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre
● Proposed that humanity was not guided by any deity, special destiny, or objective morality
● Alone in the universe, the individual must learn to create a worthwhile, ethical existence for themselves without the benfit of religion or hte hope of any life beyong hte earthly one
~Art in non-Western world
● In addition to maintiaining their own styles, non-Western authors and artists hae adopted Western forms of writing, paiting, and composing, often modigfying them with elements from their own culture
~Rabindranath Tagore
● Prior to WWII, the Indian poet was the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Price for literature
● Dazzled readers worlwide with lyrical verses inspried by Hindu mysticism
~Lu Xun/Hsun
● China’s author wrote hard-hitting stories about his country’s economic domination by outside powers, and also the governemnt’s lack of concern for lower-class commoners
~Negritude movement
● Stating int he 1930s
● Inspired by the African-Ameircan poets of the Harlem Renaissance nad hte Marxism percoloating in interwar Paris
● United African and Caribbean writer from French colonies in their opposition to European imperialism an din htier pride in being black
~Diego Rivera
● The Mexican artist who created powerful murals expressing the plight of the working poor, as well as of Mayans and other indigenous peoples
~Frida Kahlo
● Rivera’s wife
● Remains famous in her own right for her feminist themes and her bold use of colors
~Chinua Achebe
● Looks backward to the impact of British imperialism and missionary activity on Nigeria’s Ibo (Igbo) people in (1958)
● One of the first African novels to gain an international audience
~Anita Desai
● Deals with women’s lives in (1963)
~Yukio Mishima
● Japan’s prolific novelist and traditional nationalist
● Opposed what he saw as the destruction of Japan’s cultural values
● His ritual, samurai-style suicide in 1970 elevated him to cult status
~Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allend
● Latin American authos who pioneered magical realism
● A richly textured style featuring intricately detailed storytelling
~Naguib Mahfouz
● Islamic novelist who won the nobel Prize for his , a vibrant portrait of postwar Egypt
● Stabbed by an Islamic extremist in 1984
~Salman Rushdie
● Indian-born and English-speaking author
● Wrote (1988), an irreverent treatment of Islamic orthodoxy
● Was declared a heretic by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who openly called for his assassination and forced him into hiding for years
~High-art cinema
● Film directors such as Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein and Frtiz Lang dominated the cinema during the interwar years
● Postwar era has witnessed masterpieces by Weden’s deeply existential Ingmar Bergman, Italy’s Fedrico Fellini, noted for hise xtravagance and fondness for farce and Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, popularizer of the amurai epic
~Jazz
● Flourished in early 1900s America, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance
● Considered to have crossed the line between mass culture and high art
~Cabaret culture
● Flourished in Weimar Germany before 1933
● Featuring jazz music and witty social commentary in muscial dramas co-created by Kurt Weill and the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht
~Modern Olympic Games
● Created in 1896 to foster peace
● Have been used to make statements of strength or to wage symbolic battles
- Hitler’s Berlin Olympics in 1936 and Beijing’s summer Olympics in 2008
~World Cup soccer tournaments
● Active since 1930
● Galvanize audiences worldwide every four years
~Cricket
● Played wherever the British established colonies
~Propaganda
● Dictatorships have freely employed mass media as mouthpieces for propaganda and indoctrination or brainwashing
~Coca-colonization
● Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima condemed Americanizing effecgs of mass culture
~Global village
● A prediction that seems to have been partly realized, thank s to the internet
● In the 1960s, Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan gained fame for his argument that modern communications technology would create a global village
● Fulfilled by the mixing and interaction of global styles nad traditions (multicultralism)
~Synthetic forms of spirituality
● Combining elements of old religions with new beliefs
● Ex) Hare Krishna movement, Falun Gong and many varieties of new age faiths int he West
~Hare Krishna movement
● Arising in New York in the mid-1960s and borrowing chants and scriptures from Hinduism
~Falun Gong
● A meditative and martial-arts oriented practice orignating in China in the 1990s
● Much to the displeasure of hte communist regime, reviving aspects of Daosit and Buddhist worship
~Religious differences
● Frequently aggravated or contributed to ethnic and political disputes, asin the Turkish massacre of Christian Armenians, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Indo-Pakistani violence, the Catholic-Protestant troubles in northern Ireland and the Yugoslave wars of the 1990s
~Religious fundamentalism
● Proven politically influential in many places during the 1900s and 2000s
~Christian fundamentalism
● In North America has systemnatically adavanced right-wing voting preferences in electoral politics, and in the form of evangelical Protestantism, it has made major inroads into Africa nad Latin America, the latter long monopolized religiously by the Catholic Church
~Islamic fundamentalism
● Driven political trends in the Middle East
● Generally in opposition to Westernization and at times to modernization in general
● In South Asia, it has caused tensions between Hindus and Muslims and also between Hindus and Skihs
~Liberation theology
● A doctrine that arose during the 1950s and 1960s among Catholic priests in Latin America
● Arguing that Christ’s teachings mandated a preferential option for the poor
●Maintained that it was their duty to support impoverished communities against oppressive governments and elite classes, even if doing so meant opposing the hcurch hierarchy or cooperating with radical or Marxist activists
~John Paul II
● Anti-communist pope in the mid-1980s
● The Vatican cracked down on liberation theology, but the nation of combining liberal Christianity with social-justice activism remains alive thanks to the movement’s influence
~Albert Einstein
● Developed the theory of relativity, making the first major changes to the system of science and mathematics that had been synthesized by Isaac Newton
~Quantu physics
● Also in the early 1900s
● Major figures here included Maz Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi
~Rocketry and space science
● Emerged in the 1900s, following the birth of powered flight in 1903, courtesy of the Wright brothers
● Pioneers included the American Robert Goddard and Russia’s Konstantin Tsiulkovsky
● matured during WWII
● Made satellite telecommunications ossible
~Space race
● Soviets became hte first to put a human-made object into space (Sputnik in 1957) and the first human being into space (Yuri Gagarin 1961)
● Americans first succeeded in landing ont he moon (1969)
● Encouraged USSR’s work in developing orbital laboratories and US’s development of hte space shuttle
~Polio vaccine
● Jonas Salk, followed by Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine
● Both in the 1950s
~Penicillin
● Discovery in 1928 by Scotland’s Alexander Fleming
● Began the development of antibiotics
~Genetics
● Came into being during the late 1800s by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel
● James Watson and Francis Crick led the deciphering of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953
~Neurology
● In the 2000s has made astounding progress in gaining previously unimaginable insights into the workings of the brain
~Computer
● Invention during and hosrtly after WWII, notably by the British mathematician Alan Turing
~Personal computer
● The availability and affordability caused an information/digital revolution that altered the way people ocmmunicate, trasact business, entertain themselves, nad work
● Beginning in the 1980s by innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Steve Joba
~Internet
● Key to the development of information revolution
● Originally created int he 1960s for US defense purposes
● BY the end of the 1990s,a World Wide Web had connected millions of users, and it continues to grow, particualarly with the rise of wireless technolgoy and mobile communications
~Wireless technology and mobil ecommunications
● Allows access to the Internet and to social media via handheld devices like cellphones
~What were the common themes in non-Western art after WWII?
● Decolonization
● Difficulty of resisting Western (espcially US) cultral hegemony
●Opposition to politically repressive regimes
~What wre mass media used for?
● Used by creative performer,s musicians, screenwriters, and filmmakers to create genuinely great artworks
● Create products aiimed at a popular audience for purposes of entertainment, and critics of amss/popular culture have argued that it tends to cheapen art by catering to the tastes of lowest common denominator
● Gave rise to the international populatirty of sporting events
● Used for political nad corporate purposes
● Westernization and multiculturalism
~What products were poularized by mass media?
● Disney
● Hollywood films
● Rock-and-roll and popular music
● Press coverage related to popular technologies like aviation and rockets and automobiels
~How were sporting events intertwined with national pride?
● Teams from South Asia and Caribbean routinely beat the British in international competition
● Cuban, Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans often beat baseball teams from the US
● A point of pride
~How was propaganda used in Nazi Germany?
● In Nazi Germany, the brilliant filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl boosted support for Hitler’s regime with visually impressive but thoroughly propagandistic moves like (1935)
~How was propaganda used in Stalinist Russia?
● Starting in the 1930s, Stalinist Russia used both the artistic community and the mass media to churn out relentlessly optimistic artworks in teh style of socialist realism, which featured heroic images of productive peasants, tireless factory workers, and stalwart soldiers and pilots, all toiling happily under Stalin’s benevolent leadership
~How was propaganda used in free societies?
● People are brainwashed for hte advertisement of goods and the earning of profits, with mass media functioning as powerful tools in the hands of business interests
~How did American culture come to dominate post-WWII society?
● American jazz
● America dominated world markets and mass-media technolgy, Dinsney, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola among others, became eocnomic and cultural symbols recognizable not just in the US but almost literally in every part of hte globe
~What were some examples how non-Western cultures influence the West and the US?
● Reggae music, with its Afro-Caribbean roots
● Global popularity of Bollywood films produced in India, where Bombay/Mumbai serves as the equivalent to Hollywood
● Japan’s manga comics and its anime style of film animation
● Indian, Indonesian, and Georgian dishes have added extra variety and specie to the cuisines of Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia
~What characterized Western world in the period regarding to science and technology?
● During the first half of the 1900s, the Western world fully industrialized
● Moving into a world where petroleum and electricity were the primary sources of energy
●Nuclear energy has achieved its own importance in the post-WWII era
~What were some great medical advances made?
● Polio vaccine ● Elimination of smallpox ● Hearttransplants ● Artificial hearts ● Development of antibiotics
