Less is More?

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Cal McInvale writes:
 the mere fact of faulkner's "logorhea" leads me to reject the idea.
faulkner was not just a fringe modernist; he ranks with eliot, pound and
joyce -- all of whom, by the way, were heavy with allusion and verbiage.
to say that hemingway's spare writing is part of the modernist way is
simply wrong, and faulkner et al are the proof of this."
 
 
You're right, of course.  There are several strains of modernism, and the
tendency toward spareness is just one.  Perhaps the one thing all these
authors did have in common was a rejection of a Beaux Arts (or Belles
Lettres) emphasis on "decorative" motifs.  In a similar fashion, there's
been a tendency for some to read Pynchon as a Post-Modernist whose writing
is a self-contained self-referential artifact in the tradition of Borges,
Nabokov and Barth.  He does share some concerns with these writers, but
his products are far different.
 
 
Don Larsson, Mankato state U (MN)