pomo 61, Muriel Spaark

[M Farcas]

Hi Peter,
Perhaps Jacket Copy -via John O'Brien- ought to have (en)listed below slightly obsolete  -but vigorously post-modern[ist] Muriel Spark too. David Lodge labels her today in The Guardian "a post-modernist, though at the time that term was applied only to architecture". A post-modernist 'avant la lettre' ? Quite a plentiful breed they are :-)
Though Spark and Pynchon make unlikely mates together. Or do they?


A truly original writer - one with no obviously identifiable precursors - is a very rare bird, whose appearance is apt to puzzle other birds and birdwatchers at first. I reviewed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie early in my literary career, rather coolly. Its style and narrative method were so unfamiliar that I really didn't "get" it, and some years passed before I recognised the book as a masterpiece and was able to learn from it. Spark was a post-modernist, though at the time that term was applied only to architecture, and she opened up a whole new range of possible effects in the novel. Eschewing both social realism and psychological depth, she produced a kind of fiction that was playful yet profound, witty but disturbing, constantly challenging the reader's preconceptions about life and how it should be represented in fiction. Spark was fascinated by the analogies between the God of creation inscrutably presiding over human destiny, the control novelists exert over the fates of their characters, and the way people impose their own fictions on reality, as Miss Brodie does with disastrous consequences. ("She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end.") Spark explored this metafictional-theological theme further in the brilliant and audacious novellas

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/18/muriel-spark-books-martin-stannard

M Farcas ++


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Petto" <ppetto at ppetto.com>
> To: "Pynchon Liste" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: pomo 61
> Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:25:35 -0400
> 
> 
> Jacket Copy has annotated the 61 essential reads of postmodern  literature.
> 
>     Peter++
> 
> 
> ===
> 
> Peter Petto <ppetto at ppetto.com>
> Bay Village, OH

>


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