SLSL context for Pynchon's stories

[pynchonoid]

"[...] This was the style back then. The 50's and 60's
were the great age of the Big Notion: the
pseudoscientific book that explained us to ourselves
and told us where we were headed, which in most cases
was nowhere good. The avatar of them all, of course,
was Freud's ''Civilization and Its Discontents,''
which argued, among other things, that we were all
suffering from a kind of collective neurosis, and
picking up the theme, in addition to ''The Lonely
Crowd,'' were William H. Whyte's ''Organization Man,''
which made many of the same points as Riesman; Herbert
Marcuse's ''One-Dimensional Man,'' which gave a
Marxist twist to the argument and said that we were
prisoners of the economy; and Norman O. Brown's ''Life
Against Death,'' which said that the solution to all
this one-dimensionality was more eros. (In certain
60's grad-school circles, ''Life Against Death'' was a
very important book to get your date to read.)[...] "

Big Thinkster
By CHARLES MCGRATH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/magazine/29REISMAN.html

...enjoy!

-Doug




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