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Related: 1950s
Founding of: The Independent Group
Pierre Schaeffer in 1952
4'33" (1952) - John Cage
The first performance of John Cage's 4'33" created a scandal. Written in 1952, it is Cage's most notorious composition, his so-called "silent piece". The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. At the premiere some listeners were unaware that they had heard anything at all. It was first performed by the young pianist David Tudor at Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952, for an audience supporting the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund -- an audience that supported contemporary art.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) - Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) - Frantz Fanon [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Frantz Fanon on the Language of the Colonized
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man's comprehension of the dimension of the other.
The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question...No one would dream of doubting that its major artery is fed from the heart of those various theories that have tried to prove that the Negro is a stage in the slow evolution of monkey into man....
...To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of civilization. Since the situation is not one-way only, the statement of it should reflect the fact....
...The problem that we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter--that is, he will come closer to being a real human being--in direct ration to his mastery of the French language...A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
Every colonized people--in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality--finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.
[from Chapter One: "The Negro and Language"]
Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) - Guy Debord [...]
"Must We Burn Sade?" - Simone de Beauvoir [...]
In 1952, the Paris journal Les Temps Modernes featured an essay by Simone de Beauvoir that kindled controversy even within the radical community to which she belonged. Interestingly enough, "Must We Burn Sade?" appeared in print just as Beauvoir wrote the final pages of her groundbreaking feminist tract, The Second Sex. The essay in Les Temps Moderns explored the psychological and philosophical dimensions of male sadism, daring to suggest that the Marquis do Sade's literary works were politically worthwhile. How so? Because, de Beauvoir argued, Sade admitted and articulated the troubling but real connections between power and eroticism (1). Although the essay focused on men, the question presented in its title continues to pose a daunting challenge to feminism. Must women burn Sade? What are feminists to make of women - both real and fictional who cooperate and take some pleasure in their own sexual domination? Do films portraying such disturbing female complicity serve only to enforce gender inequality? And, to pose the question more provocatively, is it possible for self-consciously feminist spectators to experience such representations as sexually pleasurable?--Laura Wilson, Emerson College
Waiting for Godot (1952) - Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (1952) - Samuel Beckett [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Waiting for Godot (sometimes subtitled: tragicomedy in 2 acts) is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, written in the late 1940s and first published in 1952 by Grove Press, after having been refused by more mainstream publishers. Beckett originally wrote Godot in French, his second language, as En attendant Godot (literally: While Waiting for Godot). The simplicity of the dialogue reflects this French origin. An English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1955. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot [Aug 2005]
see also: http://www.etymonline.com/
see also: modernist literature - Grove Press - fiction - Samuel Beckett
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