The Postmodern Thread -- Pynchon, DeLillo, Barthelme, Gaddis, DFW, etc.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Postmodern Thread -- Pynchon, DeLillo, Barthelme, Gaddis, DFW, etc.

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

blue squares posted:

Can you elaborate on why you like this and what you think DeLillo is saying? It's a good point for discussion about what it means both for the book and for "postmodernism in general."

When I first made this thread it was because I liked the authors that were lumped into the category of "Postmodern." Now I've learned a bit more about it this semester.

from History and Theory of Rhetoric by James Herrick:

Postmodernism is a reaction to the intellectual values and philosophical goals of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period reason was elevated as our best hope of solving ancient human problems and creating a rational society.
[...]
The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had already begun to question Enlightenment assumptions, and thus provided the seeds of a new or "postmodern" system of thought.
[...]
Postmodern thought questions both reason and progress, and rejects what Jean-Francois Lyotard termed, in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition, "meta-narratives," those grand explanatory schemes such as Christianity or capitalism that claim to account for the entirety of human history and the human condition. Postmodernism rejected even the notion of the autonomous subject or "self" as a sociolinguistic construction. In other words, Postmodernism challenged the very foundations of Western philosophy.
[...]
Lyotard suggested that "to enter the postmodern era... we must overcome our Enlightenment legacy by abandoning the quest for truth."
[...]
It is also the case that Lyotard found language to constitute the worlds we inhabit, not fixed and eternal realities. And, the possibilities in language for creating realities were numerous.

Sterne and Swift were already openly mocking "Enlightenment assumptions" well before philosophers got around to it�Nietzsche was a hack and his most influential works are practically book reports on the satire of the previous century.

Paradox employed both as device and structure has characterized great poetry continuously since at least Ovid.

Artistic fragmentation, too, was pioneered by Sterne and expanded upon by Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and presumably tons of other non-post modernists.

The only really distinguishing feature of literary postmodernism as people have tried to describe it is a particular narrative conceit involving stories-within-stories and plots that require long attention spans to puzzle out. It's not a "literary movement," it's just a cool way to engage an audience.

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Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

Price Check posted:

While we're recommending things, check out Chimera by John Barth. Just read it for my book club and I was blown away by it. Check it out if you like re-imagined myths, layers of narration, and the author inserting multiple versions of himself into a story.

Currently in the middle of William H. Gass's The Tunnel and it is a beast.

I'm reading Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor right now (the recent Dalkey reprint with a nice black-and-white hummingbird watercolor on the cover). I just looked at an excerpt from Chimera and I'm completely blown away by how radically different the style is. He really expertly imitates the late-Restoration British style (think, I dunno, Laurence Sterne) in Sot-Weed, and I'm a bit shocked that the same guy could have written both of these.

The Tunnel is sitting on my shelf waiting for me to take a long vacation.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2017 03:53

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

hog fat posted:

I had a teacher who maintained Sot-Weed is the great American novel. I haven't read it so I'm curious as to what sense it reads postmodern?

Most obvious would probably be (1) the book-in-a-book The Marylandiad. Also (2) the studied, digressive antiplot borrowed from Tristram Shandy, (3) the pitch-perfect parody of what was already parodic, and (4) a jungle of irony both dramatic and situational.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2017 04:41

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

Everybody who's read a Barth book all the way through seems to flip out over how good it is, so I don't think "underrated" is the right word so much as "under-read."

# ¿ Mar 29, 2017 04:37

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