AtD-related? "the abstraction of non-imperial art"

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

About Heller, Pynchon and Vonnegut do also see ---

Joseph C. Schöpp: Ausbruch aus der Mimesis. Der amerikanische Roman im 
Zeichen der Postmoderne.
München 1990: Fink.

Chapter III: "Hochentropische Systeme: Heller und Pynchon", pp. 74-106

Chapter IV: "Auswege aus der Geschichte: Vonnegut und Pynchon", pp. 107-141

Thanks to Professor Schöpp for teaching Pynchon in Hamburg in 1992!


On 20.04.2012 16:49, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> For me the difference has to do with a moral versus an analytic/practical argument. S5 and C22 deal with moral equivalence and the assertion of personal moral resistance.  Gravity's Rainbow goes after a satirization that humanizes the self-destructiveness of fascism, showing its weird poetic romance with death and godlike power. It also shows the pragmatic transition to a planet ruled by corporate interests, for whom war is a mobilizing strategy and a a high stakes investment  facilitating the continued ascendance  of the  technocratic corporate power structures that gave rise to fascism. In some ways he treats the war as a conflict between external and internal mechanisms of social control. At any rate he describes an ascendant model that is independent of who wins and that relegates moral issues to the periphery.
> Both satiric approaches use humor to allow us to observe the naked emperor, but Pynchon goes into anatomical detail. This loses some moral intensity but gains intellectual intensity.
> The hero is not an individual representative of a new vision/kingdom but a return to nature, a disappearance into nature, a choice of animal, rain, sunlight, grass, circular versus parabolic  rainbow. He escapes the map and what is left is the thing itself.

> On Apr 20, 2012, at 1:16 AM, jochen stremmel wrote:
>
>> I think Gravity's Rainbow is a better novel than Slaughterhouse 5 or
>> Catch 22 but I think the latter ones are both more savage anti-war,
>> and more satirical as well.