Socio-CulturalContext

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXTWith regard to the sociocultural context, we emphasize the presence of large number of stereotypes that we explain and develop socio-cultural concepts such as:

• British-American axis and Capitalism• Women's liberation as a movement• Dominant conservative ideology• Focus material above focus on the relationship (between people, between elements ...).• Other references

BRITISH-AMERICAN AXIS AND CAPITALISMAs a result of The Second War, England underwant a deep

politic and economic shifting.

SOME SOLUTIONS:- To reduce their military costs.- Limitation of consumerism.- To strengthen their export policy.- To appeal to the American Credits again.CONSEQUENCE: A increased dependence on the USA

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

BRITISH-AMERICAN AXIS AND CAPITALISMIn 1945:• Their economy was collapsed• USA and GB signed the Mutual Aid Agreement (included

Lend Lease Act)• The international Monetary Fund was created (they

signed the Brettan Woods)• The more influential currency from that moment on

become the Dollar• The liberalization imposed by the USA affected the

conservative politics of GB.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

THE WOMEN LIBERATION MOVEMENT.This aspect is shared by the two female protagonists of the book.

The novel and the liberation of women as chronological movement are quite parallel.

The novel brings together the strategies of our patriarchal society,fixing the women in their social roles, they are determined by the body,described in terms of their female body.

An example on page 194:

"One Girl Who caught Philip Particularly as she's Attention.Waited at the Kerb to cross the street,

dressed in a crotch-high mini with long bare legs and white high up one thigh to perfect, mouth-shape Cruise. "

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

THE WOMEN LIBERATION MOVEMENT.Two examples on page 207:

"The High School Students of Rummidge Wore Their skirts for girlsvery, very short Indeed, so That They resembled mythical biformcreatures like mermaids or centaurs ... "

"Amanda blushed under Morris' scrutiny"

Are also typical social stereotypes of women:

"The femme fatale, mother and homemaker renegade etc.

There are other aspects as well as an erotic voyeurism for example when both protagonists go to a strip-tease.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY PREDOMINANT -His two protagonists are conservative.

- Also seen in the tendency to avoid conflicts and to simplify reality.

FOCUS MATERIAL RELATED TO CAPITALISM•David Lodge makes references to the elements to focus on its value, its material etc, ignoring the relationship between the elements. It may be related to the latent capitalism appears at this time.

•An example comes when we start reading with the difference between “red bricks at British universities and customs of the American States”.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

OTHER ALLUSIONSRacial differences

- The volume contains several references to black people.

For example on page 67, in which a black student wants to do his autobiography

Also on page 82 with a black woman.

In a cell where Philip shares a few hours, with two burly black (page 182) and so on.

-In all, it appeared as something different, not equal, there is no expression in normal everyday presence.

Control of the younger generation against excessive repression of society

General lack of interest in social change

etc.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

- This historical features contrast to Modernity, postmodernist is the era of disenchantment. Utopias is renounced and the idea of progress.

- change in the capitalist economic order, from a production economy to an economy of consumption.

- Disappears major charismatic figures, and there are many small idols that last until something comes up most novel and attractive.

- La appreciation of nature and environmental protection is mixed with the compulsion to consume.

- The mass media and consumer industries become centers of power

- It is not important the contents of the message to reassess how it is transmitted and the degree of conviction that may occur.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS

- Disappear ideology as a form of election of the leaders being replaced by the image.

- Hay an excessive release of information (often contradictory), through all media.

- Paragraphs media become transmitters of truth, which is expressed in the fact that what is not shown for a mass media simply does not exist for society

- The receiver away from actually removing the information received and relevance, making it mere entertainment.

- miss privacy and the lives of others becomes a show (which may, in addition, economic evaluation).

- Demystification policy.

- Demystification leaders. - Doubts about the great religions.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS

- The individuals just want to live the present, the future and the past become less important.

- There is an immediate search.

- Process loss of individual personality.

- Just the revolution that the individual is willing to carry out the interior.

- worships the body and personal liberation.

- mystical again as a justification event.

- constant concern to major disasters and the end of the world.

- miss of faith in reason and science, but in return they worship technology.

SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

- The man based his life on relativism and plurality of options, like subjectivism permeates the look of reality.

- Miss of faith in the authority.

- Indifference against injustice.

- Disappearance of idealism.

- Miss personal ambition of self.

- Disappearance valuation effort.

- there are various disclosures about the church and the belief of one God.

- Show up major changes on the various religions.

- Disappearance fantastic literature.

- create a permanent conspiracy theories to explain the great economic, political, social, religious and environmental.

SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Categorizationas a

Postmodernist Novel

• Term used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature.

• Modernist and postmodernist literature (common points):

• Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism.

• In character development explore subjectivism.

• They explore fragmentariness in narrative and character construction.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS • Irony, playfulness, black humor:

• It’s common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way.

• Intertextually:• Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel

to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style.

• Pastiche:• To combine, or “paste” together, multiple elements.• It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or

information-drenched aspects of postmodern society.• Metafiction:

• It is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS • Fabulation:

• Fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature, the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements.

• Historiographic metafiction:• Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic

metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures.

• Temporal distortion:• It is used in variety of ways, often for the sake of irony.

• Technoculture and hyperreality: • Society has moved past the industrial age and into the

information age.• In postmodernity people are inundated with information,

technology has become a central focus in many lifes.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS • Paranoia:

• For postmodernist, no ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd.

• Maximalism:• The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be

appropriate to what it represents.• Many modernist critics attack the maximalist novel as being

disorganized, sterile and empty of emotional commitment. But there are examples where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment.

• Minimalism:• Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface

description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story.

• Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader’s imagination to shape the story.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE

CHANGING PLACES: A POSTMODERNIST NOVEL • It is considered as Lodge’s most experimental novel.• David Lodge resorts to postmodernist strategies in order to

undertake a renewal of the realistic mode.• The metafictional devices employed in Changing Places connect

this novel with postmodernism.• In Changing Places, David Lodge evolves in the direction of the

“problematic novel”:• He leaves the reader not with a simple message but with a

paradox about the relationship of art to life.• Changing Places shows Lodge at his best as a writer of comic

academic fiction.

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE

CHANGING PLACES: A POSTMODERNIST NOVEL • The novel generate a striking symmetry and predictability:

• Juxtaposition of two parallel story-lines (one lead by Philip Swallow and the other by Morris Zapp)

• Pattern and structure acquire a meaning in themselves.• This encourages the reader to stand back from the novel.

• There is an omniscient external narrator.• The conventions, which are part of the shape and the subject

of the novel, are often parodically commented on thus brought to the fore in a self-conscious way.

• Changing Places ends in a “short-circuit” (a common metafictional strategy)

POSTMODERNIST LITERATURE

Style and

Topics

About the Author:• David Lodge is a British novelist . He was born

in South London in 1935. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham for 27 years.

• Changing Places (1975) was Lodge’s first book in a trilogy of campus novel (“Small World”, 1984; “Nice Work, 1988). That is the reason that he knows very well academic life from the inside; all his literary works have been released from his personal experience.

• In their own words he explains that he uses comedy to explore serious issues.

• He is also a literary critic, he has produced twelve novels and nine volumes of critical analysis, commentaries and essays.

The author works with the following genres:

Criticism, Drama, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Screenplay and Short Stories.

His main device is criticizing by using humorous techniques, such as parody, irony and satire.

Changing Places. Style

WHY WE CONSIDERED THE WORK AS A COMICAL NOVEL

• The humorous tone that dominates the text revolves around academics. He makes continuous comparisons (and ridicule) among the British educational system and American.

• The author uses puns, alliteration and other rhetorical figures which form and content come together in a way hardly transferable to other language code.

Changing Places. Style

• The main action in the work is the play on words:

• Examples:

“I doubt if we have the same problems, Mr. Sparrow”

“Swallow”“Mr. Swallow. Sorry. A much nicer bird.”

“What’s it called, Rubbish? (basura)”Rummidge””I thought you said Rubbish”

Changing Places. Style

• Utilization of METAPHORICAL VERBS to create humor:“… on his return from ferrying, O’Shea to and Mrs. Reilly…”

“…Cold-shivers roller-coasting down his curved spine…”

Changing Places. Style

• AlliterationsIt is another rhetorical resource to promote the humorous tone. They are seen for example, in the political slogan, which looks for efficiency based on the briefness and facility to be remembered:

KEEP KROOP.

SWINGING SAVES.

FUCK DUCK.

Changing Places. Style

Utilization of EXCLAMATIONS to give humorous effect and to characterize the dialect of the teacher Hogan:

Changing Places. Style

• Other resources used: THE PARODY David Lodge uses a tool in their literature to make his readers laugh and at the same time, make a critic. He mocks permanently for teachers and uses stereotypes to make them look ridiculous.

Changing Places. Style

WHY WE CONSIDERED THE WORK AS A CAMPUS NOVELS• Chris Baldick in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary

Terms gives this definition:• “Campus novel is a novel, usually comic or satirical, in

which the action is set within enclosed world of university (or similar set of learning) and highlights the follies of academic life. Many novels have presented nostalgic evocations of college days, but the campus novel in the usual modern sense dated from the 1950’s“

Changing Places. Style

During the book, Lodge uses different narrative techniques, making their unique and peculiar style:

• Chapter I: “Flying”. Description in third person.• Chapter II: “Settling”. Third-person narration.• Chapter III: “Corresponding”. Letters between the characters in

the book.• Chapter IV: “Reading”. Narrating the story through headlines in

the press.• Chapter V: “Changing”. Narrative through dialogue• Chapter VI: “Ending”. The text is structured as a play.

Changing Places. Style

Changing Places. StyleSOME EXAMPLES

• Chapter III: “Corresponding”.

Changing Places. StyleSOME EXAMPLES

• Chapter IV: “Reading”.

SOME EXAMPLES• Chapter V: “Changing”.

Changing Places. Style

Changing Places. StyleSOME EXAMPLES

• Chapter VI: “Ending”.

• The lives of two university professors from different perspectives:• Family• Labor• Unreached Dreams

• Social problems of the moment• Contrasts:

• Different types of families and different culture • Teacher - student relationship:

• USA: close, even in the campus newspaper is valued teachers and the data are taken into account when renewing or not a teacher.

• ENGLAND: distant relationship, both between teacher and student and among teachers themselves.

Changing Places. Topics

The Main

Characters

-The Main Characters-

CHANGING PLACES tell us the story of two teachers of university, one of them in England and the other one in America who for different reasons in their lives they decide to make an exchange.

During this experience they will be living parallel lives in the environment of the other one and different kind of situations that make them change.

Morris Zapp• Morris Zapp is a prestigious literary’s Teacher in the campus

of Euphoria States, America, with mainly articles and books written, specially about Jane Austen’s figure. He is married but in process of divorce by his numerous infidelities, and also he has a daughter and two twins.

• Because his wife asked him to live their house on condition to pospone the divorce, Zapp decide to make and exchange and travel to Rummidge in London.

• Zapp shows himself egocentric, arrogant, proud, aloof and cold. The relation with the other is not good at all, is for that his daughter changed her surname, for have not any kind of relation with him.

-The Main Characters-

Morris Zapp• During the novel he descovers his daughter, Melanie and

after his yet wife had a relation with Philip Swallow, the other in exchange, but Zapp, according to his style of life seduces the Swallow’s wife and began another relation with her.

-The Main Characters-

PHILIP SWALLOW• Philip Swallow is teacher in the Rummidge University in

London. He is married with three children.

• He is so tired with his routine and mediocre life, with more debts and without emotions. The University give him the opportunity to make and exchange that allow him to escape of all of that.

• Since he is in Euphoria state he has mainly experience and discover new sensations. He finally feels happy and free. These emotions and sensations came from Melanie, the Zapp’s daughter and Mrs. Zapp, who gets to keep an affair with.

-The Main Characters-

• The character of Philip Swallow is totally opposite to Zapp’s. Philip show himself humble, understanding, loving and also a little puritane at the beggining, show himself regreted. He will suffer a clash between his ethics and morals and his desires.

-The Main Characters-

DÉSIRÉE ZAPP• Désirée is the wife of Morris Zapp. She is decided with the

divorce from Morris for all his infidelities. She has two twins and a good relation with Melanie, the First marriege’s daughter of Morris.

• As she askes him to leave their house Morris decides to make the exchange with an English Teacher.

• With Morris far she feels so free for begin a new life and after some facts she establish an affair with Philip Swallow, the other in the exchange.

-The Main Characters-

HILARY SWALLOW• Hilary is married with Philip Swallow and has three

children. She is a lovely and self-sacrificing wife and mother that to allow his husband taken this great opportunity she assumes the responsability to keep at Rummidge taking care of their house and children.

• When she knew about the relation between Melanie and his husband she decided forgive him, but since Philip’s second affair her mind change and she decided to have an affair with Morris Zapp, the American teacher.

-The Main Characters-