NOTES OF THE DAY 14^th OCTOBER 2019

ORAL TEST

Topic: Post-modernity and analysis of an extract by David Lodge

• we are what we have lived ---> the present is a mix of past memories and future expectations

• there is no self ---> capitalism (“self made man”) and classic novel recognized a self, post-modernism doesn't

• human beings are cultural products

• “you are what you speak” ---> I am what my interlocutor understand from me

• there are lots of truths as much as people who speak ---> concept of relativity for the first time expressed by Einstein

• human beings are hybrid ---> multiple identity, one self doesn't exist

• Robyn is a university teacher, she advances the students her thesis about the “self”

• What does she want her students to understand? She wants to teach her students to become mentally autonomous so they can understand the world

• the idea of the “self” is out of time ---> we are submitted and trapped in infinite web of discourses

• “there is only production” ---> there are many selves in human beings expressed in production and language

• “we are what we eat” ---> we have memory even in tastes ---> we are the result of our experiences

• we cannot have the real perception of ourselves

• human being doesn't have total control over his own linguistic production

• messages are never neutral and are always indirect