What Was Postmodernism?

[Bekah]

 From that Bryan link and caused a chuckle:

" 'It was sad to see postmodernism disappear before we could explain  
it, I kind of liked postmodernism, I was happy in the postmodern  
condition, as happy if not happier than in the previous condition, I  
don't remember what that was called but I was glad to get out of it,  
and now here we are again faced with a dilemma, what shall we call  
this new thing towards which we are going, this new thing I haven't  
seen yet, did you see it Gaston, what can we call it,  
postpostmodernism seems a bit too clumsy, and popomomo not serious  
enough, I thought of calling this new condition The People's  
Revolution Number Four [...] but I'm afraid that Gallimard or some  
other big bookseller already has these names under copyright, in any  
case I think the name of this new condition that's about to descend  
upon us should have the word new in it, what do you think, Gaston... ' "

Bekah



On Jan 18, 2009, at 5:43 AM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> 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
>
>