ENG328Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 43: Nadsat, Onomatopoeia
A Clockwork Orange
If an agent can only perform good or evil, he is a clockwork orange
Something mechanical imposed upon the natural
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Most of the words stem from Russian but sound like English
Horrorshow means good
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Language based on sound
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Lots of onomatopoeia
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Make it sound violent
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Ontological nullification of human identity
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Motiveless - they don't need money
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Infantile words thrown in there
Estranging effect
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Fascination with the sound of words as much as with their meaning
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Law and order nowhere to be found
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Doesn’t like the sight of Dim after assaulting a shop keepers wife
Shouldn’t look as if you've been in a fight
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Clockwork seems to have triumphed over Orange by the end
Or the two seem to merge
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Moral ambiguity
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Alex is exquisitely attuned to classical music
Even though it incites violence in him
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Instinctual drive and higher aesthetic appreciation coexist
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Poet of Nadsat
Art accentuates his capacity to imagine violence
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Paradox of high culture
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Steiner - language and silence
There can be no poetry after Auschwitz
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How can people schooled on Kant, Bach, Beethoven, Hegel, etc.
perpetrate the final solution
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Notion that culture humanises your horizons??
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Opera associated with violence
Bugs Bunny using violence for
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Alex has a genuine aesthetic sensibility
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Poet of ultraviolence
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Creative person with no outlet
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Violent and the aesthetic interfuge
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Motiveless juvenile malignancy exists•
A lot of what Alex does under the guise of anarchistic violence is
condemnable by any moral code
Undercurrent of dark humour
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Music sharpens him up
If reading actually made us better people, then academics would be the
best people
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Danger of empathising with fictional characters over real people
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We have a limited amount of empathy
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Graphic depictions of violence can desensitise or anaesthetise but can also
have the opposite effect
When we are exposed enough to the repellent, we close our eyes to it
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Lecture 43
Monday, March 27, 2017
2:04 PM
