postmodernism etc

[Diana York Blaine]

First let me add my voice to the chorus of Firesign Theater fans (though I
have to admit I listened to them back when I still got a good buzz from
pot and had an actual record player).  Second let me say that the death of
the author I can handle but the demise of the (LA) reader has me blue,
even down here in cowboy country where god has seen fit to send me.  Third
I wanted to address Jules' query as to what postmodernism has to do with
literature. My favorite definition, and one I sneaked into my
diss(ertation) on Pynchon, inter alia, hails from Spy magazine:  "Does the
text contain shopping lists, menus, and/or recipes?  Does it contain  a
novel within a novel that has the same title as the novel? Does the cover
feature a bunch of geometric shapes and a quote from Robert Coover?  Does
it remind you [of] Celine, if Celine drank a lot of Tab and watched a lot
of TV?  Is it easy to hate?"  Another quippy but (more) useful definition:
In modernism there's something to be alienated FROM.  Pomo, then , becomes
mere surface, self-reflexive, parodic, pastiche.  Ihab Hassan, Francois
Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Beaudrillard, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, all
happily hold forth on the topic. Lyotard calls postmodernism an exercise
in "unrepresentability."  But, yes and no to refer to an earlier posting,
I do think much literature seeks to shore up ruins, but much written by
traditionally marginalized groups, African-American women authors is my
purview, doesn't look with nostaligia back to an edenic white male
hegemony--for obvious reasons. Nor do they represent woman with the same
ambivalence found in Pynchon's V., where the credo is "approach and
avoid."  Diana