McHugh 'Cultural Politics, Postmodernism and White Guys'

[jbor]

Though it's been out for a little while now, it hasn't been mentioned here
before as far as I can recollect. Amongst much else, the article provides an
astute reading of 'The Story of Byron the Bulb' as a sort of dumbshow of the
novel's wider cultural and socio-historical sensibilities and as an
illustration of Pynchon's Horkheimer & Adorno-inspired Enlightenment
critique. Despite a couple of glaring typos, it's one of the most perceptive
critical discussions of GR around:

> 'Cultural politics, postmodernism, and white guys: Affect in Gravity's
> Rainbow'
> Patrick McHugh. College Literature. West Chester: Spring 2001.
> Vol.28, Iss. 2;  pg. 1, 28 pgs
> 
> Abstract (Article Summary)
> McHugh discusses the book "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon and its
> effects on cultural politics and social history. Published in 1973, the book
> foregrounds many of the political questions central to debates in the 1960s
> between the counterculture and the New Left, namely the question of whether
> alternative cultural practice leads to change in social history.

I can forward a pdf to anyone would like to read the full article. Contact
me offlist.

And a request. The pynchon-list archives do, or could, provide a useful
research catalogue, both for list-subscribers and non-subscribers. The
Keyword search, arrange by author and arrange by thread functions in
particular are useful ways of locating specific data and of filtering out
the signal from the noise. However, html posts end up as virtually
unreadable gibberish in the archive. I believe it's a one-click task on most
email software to change an email to plain text; as well as being a courtesy
to readers, I guess it's also a question of whether the poster's purpose is
to be read, to discuss, and/or to provide relevant information to other
subscribers, or not. Another issue is that html posts gobble up more
kilobytes than do plain text posts, so people who pay their email accounts
on a per download basis are less likely to subscribe or stick around when
the W.A.S.T.E. quota in their inbox invariably ends up as a waste-quota.

best