GRGR(30): You will want cause and effect.

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Dave Monroe wrote:

> Well, again, my advice to all concerned, for what littlke it is indeed worth, would
> be not to get too conecrned with the modernism/postmodernism thing, much less
> whether of not Pynchon is a postmodern author, much less a postmodernist, whether or
> not his texts are postmodern, and so forth and so on, unless you have some pressing
> reason to do so. 

I very much agree. Postmodernism may be something like Slothrop near
the end of the book.

"We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop," a spokesman
for the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with the Wall
Street Journal.

Interviewer: You mean, then, that he was more a rallying-point.

Spokesman: No, not even that. Opinion even at the start was divided. It
was one of our fatal weaknessnes. [I'm sure you want to hear about fatal
weaknesses.] Some called him a "pretext." Others felt that he . . . .

p. 738

		P.














 Think of the distinction, the set of distinctions, as a useful
> heuristic, handy for genrating ideas, interpretations, in short, readings, but
> something that it might well not be necessary to commit yrself to, ceratinly not if
> you've no professional stake in the matter.  But, again, if you're having problems
> with determining what ":postmodernism," "postmodernity" might be, well, keep in
> mind, conceots like "modernism," "modernity," "the ranaissance," 'the baroque," "the
> medieval," "realism," "naturalism," "romanticism," "classicism," wahtever, aren't
> necessarily any better developed, we've just become used to them, comfortable with
> them, perhaps we've even reified them, through sheer repetition, if nothing else ...
> but a few useful works on the subject nonetheless ...
> 
> --Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism
> --Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity
> --Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn
> --Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde
>