Emory Bortz in the matrix

[jolly]

> In the thematic context, perhaps no modern topic has been given more
> consideration than the way in which we are thought to create our own
selves, > or to put it another way, the way in which we are ourselves finally
> arbitrary signs to be filled up by whatever haunts us at the moment. 

Apt examples of the sort of over-generalized, unverifiable, unsubstantiated drivel that academic literary swindlers thrive on. 
 
"the  moderns called language and form into question....they seriously
considered the degree to which all utterance is devoid of ground"
 
Hmmm. More unsubstatiated, sweeping claims.  What does it mean that "utterance is devoid of ground?"  Reading  a modernist tale such as Hemingway's  Soldier's Home some readers might perceive that there is, at least implicitly, a reference being made to a specific historical event--i.e WWI. On a basic level there is an event or historical context being referred to, the fictional character of Krebs being situated in relation to an objective and terrifying reality.   Language, be it fictional, ordinary, or formal, points to things.  
 
 
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 
49, a  work in which it is not the void at the center of humans that is at 
issue > but rather the great plenitude. 
 
 
Yes, but that plenitude is better construed (and in less -psychoanalytical and subjective terms) as a glut of codes, of information: political, historical  and technological. COL 49 in a sense embodies the implications and entailments, both absurd and intoxicating, of the System, and of rnodern capitalism.   
 
"Both works focus on the same 
questions-the  problem of identity in the modern world, the question of the reality 
of our  identity, the related concerns of alienation and despair--but 
"Bartleby"  marks these problems in terms of lack whereas Lot 49 construes them 
in terms  of the horrifying plenitude of meaning." 
 
 
Wow. You got the alienation (Oedipa is quite a troubled and naive girl), and get a B on your book report for Professor McSapphly, bless her heart, but miss the cyber-jouissance, the Lissajous  waves rippling  into the  California night, baybe.... 
 
 

		
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