Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi

[Bryan Snyder]

Sweeeeeeeet... Thanks!

On 5/15/08 4:01 PM, "Ian Livingston" <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>> 
>> 

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