Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi

[Ian Livingston]

Tim,
Thanks for this.  This may be just what I needed to support a thesis I have
been working on for about a year and a half, taking this same use of the
disfigured form as metaphor some notable authors and poets were using even
in early 20th C literature as representative of cultural disfigurements.
Another source I have been working from that has been very helpful in this
is the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnston, especially Philosophy in the
Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.  The body as
metaphor for culture is nothing new, but since Joyce and Yeats it has taken
on considerable impact.  P shows just how much even one author working alone
can deepen a metaphor, when many pick it up, the trend gains depth, span and
resonance.
-i

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 2:21 AM, Tim Strzechowski <dedalus204 at comcast.net>
wrote:

>   Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi
> by Giorgio Mobili
>
> *ISBN13:* 9780820497136
> *ISBN10:* 0820497134
>
> *Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi*examines the recurrence of violent body figuration in the fiction of
> Pynchon, Puig, and Volponi, and also in the fiction of several other
> postmodern authors who published their literature during the last quarter of
> the twentieth century. Different as they may be, these authors engage in
> analogous representative strategies, as their prose is frequently and
> similarly disrupted by obscene images of wounded, torn, or deformed bodies.
> In their mix of irony and morbidity, in the hyper-reality of their
> depiction, in the unwarranted, apparently random nature of their occurrence,
> these shocking outbreaks exemplify an uncompromisingly irritable style which
> is one fundamental element of postmodernist representation. The author
> argues how through their fascination with obscene material, these writers
> address burning issues about the significance of the corporeal in a
> seemingly discourse-defined universe. This book is a great resource for
> literary graduate students who are interested in a comparative approach to
> contemporary literature.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20080515/3f2860f3/attachment-0001.html>