Postmodern Aparcantic Novels

[Henry Musikar]

This from Containing Multitudes, "The official site for the 2010 British
Association for American Studies conference, hosted by the UEA, April 8-11
2010."  

Allusions of Grandeur - Ironically brief thoughts on the postmodern epic
novel

A guest post by AMS student Alex Jenkins.

The tradition of the literary epic[1] extends as far back as the literary
tradition itself. From Homer's Odyssey to Joyce's Ulysses the extended,
meditative, and highly allusive fictional form is present in some of the
greatest canonical works of Western literature. The postmodern era, however,
marked a different epoch for the epic.[2] It was, as David Foster Wallace
has remarked, 'the first generation of writers that had actually read a lot
of criticism.'[3] 

Let's then take, as examples, three Aparcantic tomes from the past century,
each roughly two decades apart and each fearsomely erudite: The Recognitions
by William Gaddis, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and Infinite Jest by
David Foster Wallace. What makes these postmodern epics so distinctive is
their commitment to allusiveness. Postmodern epics do not allude merely to
elucidate certain themes, or establish themselves in the literary canon, or
to show off, although all of these are certainly factors. Rather, the
allusions comprise the very fabric of the text, somehow inextricable, as
though the authors are not so much deploying their erudition as being bound
by it and forced to recombine iterations and permutations of
intertextuality.

http://american-studies-uea.blogspot.com/2009/07/some-ironically-brief-thoug
hts-on.html 

Aparcantic?

Henry Mu
Sr. IT Consultant
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/