Please cc V. Lombari

[SGSMOOT]

>Does the reference to a familar song within a piece of fiction help you 
>to situate yourself in time and space within the story, or is it an 
>annoyance? (For example, anyone who has read Pynchon's Vineland can 
>easily recall the effects of such popular culture flowing forth from 
>nearly every page.)
         
         
         The _post_ modern uses popular culture as reference because the 
         classical allusions so beloved of earlier ages of writing are largely 
         lost. The high-modern poets were still dragging Ariadne and Dido, 
         Theseus and Aeneas into their work at regular intervals. With the 
         virtual disappearance of the "classical education," only individuals 
         with a penchant for allusion will understand oblique references to any 
         but the commonest of classical images. (my unstated goal in grad school 
         was to be able to read "The Waste Land" without looking _up_ the 
         footnotes... looking _at_ I can handle, but when the footnote is still 
         greek . . . it's a problem)
                
         "Postmodern" references to current culture can work both to place a 
         work in time, and, unfortunately, to distance readers from the work and 
         those references. Pynchon is an _excellent_ example: _Gravity's 
         Rainbow_'s wealth of references to wartime England added a certain 
         texture to the novel for this humble reader, but I (American born and 
         raised, 1957 to the present day) didn't react to the references as I 
         did to those in _Vineland_. The latter novel's references were 
         accessible to me - there is a difficult-to-identify significance to 
         driving a Camaro, listening to this or that popsong on the radio. 
         Similar signifiers in _GR_ "float" rather farther below the surface, 
         since my exposure to 1944-45 England is primarily limited to Hollywood 
         movies.
         
         The use of classical allusions made earlier literatures accessible to 
         anyone with an appropriate educational background, no matter their 
         nationality or culture. References in postmodern lit. are both more and 
         less available - more available to those for whom the allusions 
         resonate, less available to people "outside" the culture.