Hardly TRP at all, yet............

[Markekohut]

LIKE, as FB says.....what a nice smart riff on McHale's frame.....

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 6, 2012, at 7:02 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

>> a topos in both senses, geographical as well as rhetorical. --- [I]n
>> order to understand why Ohio, of all places, belongs to the postmodernist
>> repertoire, we need to take into account the semiotics of American space
>> in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
>> Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), p. 49.
> 
> McHale is clever. Notice how he connects his reading of the Ohio Zone,
> back, to the development of American Literature,  Cooper & Co. and to
> Chase's definition of Romance, then to the  Closing of the American
> Frontier.
> 
> Notice that he fails to mention Turner, but he gets us to Baum and Oz
> (Kansas/Ohio) circa 1900.
> 
> Notice that he fails to mention Henry Adams, and the turn of the
> century zone of all zones, the mechanical world exhibitions that Adams
> haunts, and that become the zone, for Pynchon, from V. to AGTD.
> 
> McHale skips the mechanical cities (The East, NYC and Long Island)
> that Nick Caraway will move to from the west and away from....back to
> the West. Recall that all of the GG characters are
> Westerners...Caraway a tool man, not a machine man  or bonds
> (abstrations) man...
> 
> His point is, it seems, to get us out of the excluded middle, that is,
> figuratively, Ohio. So, Ohio, not Ohio, but, a Swing State of Mind.