from the terrif article Dave M. just sent on C of L49

[Dave Monroe]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "As I will demonstrate, Pynchon's satire of the Hegelian dialectic"
>
> which became much more obvious---visible---in AtD...

>From Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson,
Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992),
Chapter 4, "Against the Avant: Pynchon's Products, Pynchon's
Pornographies," pp. 207-66:

Alec McHoul and David Wills ... have argued that Gravity's Rainbow
deconstructs the distinction not only between elect and preterite but
between "use and mention, serious and parasitic, normal and
citational" as well, creating in place of these distinctions a
"material typonymy" by which "a material equivalence between the
signifiers replaces a rhetorical difference between them" ([Writing
Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis] 1990, 53).... McHoul and
Wills call [Gravity's Rainbow] "post-rhetorical," in that it "handles
or plays with dualistic differences such that they are overcome by
making any dilemma's dual aspects appear identical, these then
producing, cojointly, a new 'first' term for a further, and
qualitatively distinct, duality" ([WP] 54).... these are some of
McHoul's and Wills's examples:

    use/mention//material typonymy
    parable/parabola//rocket trajectory
    rocket/penis//Jamf
    penis/polymer//Imipolex
    reality/fantasy//cinema
    us/Them//Slothrop

The last two of these, I think, are the most "useful," in the sense
that they are capable of being reinscribed elsewhere; and to them I
will add two of my own:

    elect/preterite//cultural artifact
    production/consumption//transmission

For what is important about "fictions" in Gravity's Rainbow is not
that they can only mirror themselves as they attempt to represent a
world, nor that they give equal space (an apparently equal gravity) to
the Duino Elegies and King Kong, Tannhauser and underground comix ....
 Rather, what is distinctive about Gravity';s Rainbow's postsomething
(-modern, -avantgarde, -rhetorical) treatment of culture is that its
emphasis is not on artifacts but on their transmission and
reinscription; not on overturning the hierarchy between canonical and
apocryphal but on examining how the canonical and apocryphal can do
various kinds of cultural work for variously positioned and
constituted cultural groups...  (p. 229)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0012&msg=51441