Robert E. Kohn's "Pynchon's Transition"

[Dave Monroe]

STYLE, Vol 43, No 2 (2009)

Pynchon’s Transition from Ethos-based Postmodernism to Late-Postmodern
Stylistics
Robert E. Kohn

Abstract

The Crying of Lot 49 was written while the postmodern ethos was
developing. The essence of that ethos, which Pynchon helped shape, was
the repudiation of modernity’s unconditional faith in the
inevitability of human betterment through scientific, technological,
moral, and cultural advancement, the rejection of modernity’s penchant
for sweeping totalizations, particularly about right versus wrong and
good versus evil, the refutation of modernity’s scrupulous separation
of fact from fiction, and its disavowal of modernity’s cultural
elitism. In the present essay I argue that The Crying of Lot 49
influenced the postmodern American art of the 1980s, specifically that
of Robert Longo, David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Keith Haring, which in
turn influenced Pynchon’s shift to late-postmodernist stylistics in
Against the Day. Whereas the ethos underlying The Crying of Lot 49 is
onerous, the stylistics inspired by that ethos render Against the Day
relatively light-hearted. Not only is style in itself more
light-hearted  than revisiting historical trauma, but Pynchon’s era
benefited by the abating fear of total nuclear destruction and
scientists’ shift from concern for the increasing thermodynamic
entropy of the solar system to the celebration of decreasing entropy
at the worldly level.

http://www.engl.niu.edu/ojs/index.php/style/article/view/17

Full Text: PDF

http://www.engl.niu.edu/ojs/index.php/style/article/viewFile/17/14

Thanks!

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 9:10 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pynchon’s Transition from Ethos-based Postmodernism to Late-Postmodern
> Stylistics can be read online. Kohn's connection of Henry Adams to V.
> and to AGTD is, while a bit muddled by the postmodernism
> late-postmodern terms, and a bit absurd, Kohn, for example, claims
> that visual art, unlike verbal art, can not articulate an ethos, is
> worth reading as we drag our reading of V., kicking and clawing the
> carpet, neck twisting a hole from which scalding screams blow ...blow
> blow the boyz down....
>