Conte: Postmodern American Fiction

[Paul Mackin]

jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> Conte, Joseph. _Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American 
> Fiction_. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
>
> "[... Conte] examines numerous authors, prominent among them John 
> Hawkes, Kathy Acker, Don Delillo, and Thomas Pynchon. His theory of 
> postmodern literature, like Fredric Jameson's, envisions a permanent 
> and irreparable breach between modernist and postmodernist works. 
> Using Thomas Kuhn's proposal that scientific progress proceeds via 
> radical paradigm shifts, Conte asserts modernist science and 
> literature have been superceded by the new paradigm of postmodern 
> science and literature. Citing authors ranging from James Joyce to 
> T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Conte reads modernism and traditional 
> science as part of an outmoded paradigm which obsessively seeks to 
> order reality because of a latent fear of disorder and 
> unpredictability. This results in a modernist 'pohtical aesthetic 
> whoseconcern for centering control approaches fascism' (2002, 11). [...]" 


> Not to be too much of a philistine but this is truly funny.


P


>
> From the review (pdf) by Jeffrey Ebbesen in _College Literature_ 32.2, 
> Spring 2005, pp. 192-4.
>
> best
>
>