What Was Postmodernism?

[Robin Landseadel]

I already posted this link, responding to Lawrence Bryan. A must-read  
for all p-listers, with some of the best critical explication of  
Pynchon's m.o.:

	. . .This sense of "living on after the end" is a striking motif in
	Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, published December 2006, the
	massive Against the Day. Weighing in at 1085 pages, Against
	the Day is set in the years between 1893 and the Great War of
	1914-18, with a brief post-war coda. Among many, many other
	things, Against the Day is about the inevitable approach of the
	Great War, . .

	. . . What is all this about living in Hell? I don't think we can take
	Pynchon literally here; he is not being eschatological, not
	talking about the End Times in any Book of Revelations sense.
	What he is talking about here is, precisely, "the end of the world
	as we know it": the experience of passing through a wrenching,
	maybe catastrophic, transition in human history; the experience
	of aftermath. Nor do I think that he is speaking here only, or
	even principally, about the Great War and its aftermath. We
	need to bear in mind that Pynchon himself has been a resident
	of New York City for a number of years, and that on September
	11, 2001 he was presumably in Manhattan, at home. I take
	Against the Day to be a sort of coded representation of the
	experience of 9/11, displaced onto the Great War of 1914-18.
	Or, if that's too limited and simplistic a reading, then Pynchon is
	at least trying to capture what it means, what it feels like, to
	"change tenses," as Raymond Federman puts it - for instance,
	to change tenses from "What Is Postmodernism?" to "What Was
	Postmodernism?"

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/tense