VLVL(12) pgs 218-226

[Bekah]

Anyone read Julian Barnes'  Flaubert's Parrot?  Anyone read "A Simple  
Soul?  by Flaubert?

But where is the "real" parrot - does it matter?

Bekah


On Feb 23, 2009, at 1:50 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>