gnostic and Gnostic

[Otto Sell]

Kai,
why don't you accept "Vineland" and "M&D" as postmodern - they definitely
are. There are a lot of postmodern works of the 80's and 90's - dunno if all
they've written is great but additionally to the writers named below by RJ
there is a whole postmodernist school of writers like Samuel Beckett,
William Gaddis, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Joseph McElroy, Salman
Rushdie, Robert Coover, William Gass, Stanley Elkin, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul
Bellow, Norman Mailer, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, Michel Butor,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec, John Fowles, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Italo Calvino, Günther Grass (apologies to the ones I forgot), directors
like Antonioni (remember 'Blow Up'), Fellini, Godard, Pasolini, later
Greenaway.

Running around on the streets was good in the 60' and 70's (I gladly
remember the snowy car-free Sundays of December 1973) but I assume that one
reason why our own counterforce failed is that we lacked a theory, we were
still only able to cling to Marxism or Mysticism, one of the multiple
binaries which split the movement later (as you will remember), a theory
appropriate enough to explain the 20th century, not the 19th.

Interestingly enough literature and philosophy (and architecture, but that's
not my field) developed this theory together. What do you think of Wolfgang
Welsch's books? He's got a nice little one called "Ästhetisches Denken"
(Reclam Universal Bibliothek Nr. 8681, Stuttgart 1993, thus fairly cheap)
where he states (even in a chapter heading) that postmodern philosophy was
born out of the spirit of modernist art, he's talking about Dubuffet,
Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Kamper, Sloterdijk and Adorno.

Let me add born out of the spirit of Vorticism, Cubism, Joyce, Kafka, T.S.
Eliot, W.B. Yates and many (and much) more. The term Modernism clearly is
such a simplification as postmodernism is necessarily too.

You may say that for me postmodernism is a straw to cope with a chaotic
world, but since you seem to be able to combine the mystic and the marxist
intellectual in daily life better than I can, let me admit that in return I
consider you as a very postmodern person (no higher praise from my side
possible).

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: Lorentzen / Nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 7:11 AM
Subject: Re: gnostic and Gnostic
>
>
> ----------
> >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
>
>