the Tube in VL WAS Re: Literacy (is Re: Harry Potter)

[stuck outside of mobile with the memphis blues again]

Doug Millison writes:
>they want.  That adds up to a devastating critique of the Tube, in my 
>reading of the novel.  I think we all agree that Pynchon is subtle 
>and complex; the critique of TV that I read in Vineland comes with 
>the novel's sometimes playful attitude towards TV that shows, at 
>least, Pynchon has done his homework (jumping from that to say that 
>Pynchon values TV as high or higher than books, or the Western high 
>culture in general, or some other argument designed to shoe-horn him 
>into some PoMo niche, is problematic, in my opinion); Pynchon also 
>subverts Tube genre narrative strategies in a way that some critics 
>say amounts to an homage to the medium. I don't think those arguments 
>undercut the negative critique of TV in the novel. This will all be 

It seems that the sudden, slight furor over this TV critique
is also overlooking the time at which the critique was made.
I'm not too up on my TV theory (hmmm), but from what I hear the
90s have been very good for TV, compared to the wasteland of the
previous years.



Josh

-- 
josh blog: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/blog/
      tdr: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/tdr/