VLVL(12) pgs 218-226

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 1:06 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> Is there a difference?


Good point.

I like to think of Pynchon's use of parrots as a perfect sign, a  
summing up of an esthetic and a literary movement in shorthand. But I  
don't know enough about parrots and postmodernism to get all  
deconstructive on your posterior, so I'm going to hunt down parrots in  
Pynchon and see what pops up.

Meanwhile, a quick and lazy search of Pynchon & signifiers yields:

	. . . the remarkably theory-saturated approaches of the 1990s
	and early 2000s have, as McHoul and Wills explained, often
	explicitly abandoned the idea of exegetically tracing (and
	explaining) the "'actual,' 'underlying' rationale for Pynchon's
	writing" . . .   . . . The preference, in this earlier mode of Pynchon
	criticism, was for drifting along with the author's own signs,
	symptoms, and signifiers, allowing Pynchon's literature to be
	"bookmatched" with Derridean (and other theorists')
	assumptions in such a way that the demarcation between the
	subject and method of analysis is deliberately blurred. Seminal
	pre-texts for approaches of this kind were Leo Bersani's twenty-
	year-old article on the prevalence of paranoia as an operative
	system at work both within the fictional world(s) inside the novel
	and at the level of reading it, or Brian McHale's observation that
	in Pynchon's prose, ontological aspects tip over into
	epistemological ones (and vice versa). Berressem had
	subsequently picked up the deconstructivist ball and kicked it
	further, adding a certain Lacanian spin, in 1993. More recently
	Dana Medoro seems to be the critic who, while arguing with an
	astounding rigor, has most refreshingly been inspired by the
	textual trajectories offered in, for instance, The Crying of Lot 49.
	At the same time, most of these readings were - or at least
	appeared to me as if they were - acts of defiance that, like the
	novelist himself, did not care too much about paying reverence
	to the author. Instead they provided what partly looks like a
	relaunch of New Criticism, with its focus on elucidating the story
	and discourses of the texts, without contributing to the author's
	(anyway unnecessary) canonization through a mixture of
	pathos and curiosity. If Pynchon's is a prose that goes against
	the grain, and if these critical examples likewise overtly or
	covertly oppose the prevailing standards of literary studies, the
	Munich conference saw astoundingly many scholars
	backlashing and falling back into speculation about possible
	sources (or intertextual connections) and biographical criticism.