gnostic and Gnostic

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 has pynchon ever called himself or his work "postmodern"? does it really make  
 sense to name vineland "postmodern" but finnegans wake "modern"? do you think  
 that fiedler or brinkmann, if still alive, would go for the phrase "pomo rules 
 ok"? and do we need the label "pomo" to devote ourselves to the beauty of 
 pynchon's prose?

kai


jbor schrieb:
>
>
> ----------
> >From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (Lorentzen / Nicklaus)
> >To: o.sell at telda.net
> >Subject: Re:  gnostic and Gnostic
> >Date: Wed, Dec 20, 2000, 8:53 PM
> >
>
> > but where are the great 'pomo' works from
> >   the 80s and 90s? [vineland and m&d will not be accepted as representatives
> of
> >   this genre!]
>
> I would say that it is the very notion of "genre" as being something stable
> and finite which has been overturned, both by postmodernist criticisms and
> postmodern fictions (such as _M&D_ and _Vineland_, among many other examples
> c.1950-2001.) And, not all of those critical texts Otto listed are from the
> 60s and 70s. What of post-colonialism (eg Homi Bhabha's _Nation and
> Narration_ 1990, and _Location of Culture_ 1994) . . . cyberpunk (Gibson et
> al) . . .  the hypertext novel (perhaps a dead end, admittedly) . . .
> Rushdie, Coetzee, Gibson, Gaddis, Foster Wallace . . .
>
> > let's face it: a generation has gone into the land (- as we say
> >   here, don't know if this formulation does exist in the english language),
> and
> >   "pomo" has turned into a fat bitch kept up by exactly that kind of
> >   institutional indolence brinkmann and fiedler wanted to overcome ...
> >
> I don't know that this is at all true. (Would you say the same of Pynchon,
> for example? Or is it easier to claim that his later texts are no longer
> "postmodernist" and seek to redeem him somehow, while slagging
> "postmodernism" in the very same breath?) Anyway, it's the practitioner who
> becomes a "fat bitch", not the practice.
>
> best
>
>