the postmodern condition

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "pynchonoid" <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: the postmodern condition


> I'm glad you enjoyed the article, Otto, and sorry you
> missed the fine irony of retitling it with a phrase I
> know has a very specific meaning for many p-listers.

I did not miss your irony, but I mainly wanted to correct the wrong image
the author of the article was giving with his last sentence.

> I certainly didn't mean to offend.

Don't worry, I didn't take it as that. Actually I'm a very humorous person.

> At the same time I do
> think that many people, outside the realm of literary
> critics and theorists, consider "postmodernism" to
> have something to do with underminining traditional
> views of what's "true".  Perhaps Ted Rall used
> "postmodernism" in that sense.
>
> =====
> http://pynchonoid.org/
>

A lot of people outside the realm of political comment and journalism
surely think that George Bush is a great guy and national hero, so that's
no criterium at all.

I've understood that last sentence as the typical anti-postmodernist stance
against the "everything goes"-attitude that so often is -mostly wrong-
attributed
to postmodernism. My critique of Ted Rall is that in his last sentence he's
just using a prejudice, and a weak one too!

The "traditional views of what's "true"" have already been destroyed by
modernism. Just think of Cubism in the realm of the arts or of Joyce and
Beckett in literature.

"Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight.
The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It
was not raining." (Beckett, Molloy, p. 162)

Otto