death of a salesman Worthington

[Robin Landseadel]

"Worthington himself became a figurehead for the omnipresence of  
advertising in modern life; for some, he personified the new, invasive  
capitalism of the television era. The ads always began with the same  
hasty introduction—“Here’s Cal Worthington and his dog Spot!”—as  
though he was always there, hiding behind the curtain of commercial  
breaks, waiting to ambush us and sell, sell, sell. When Worthington  
died last month, at ninety-two, it wasn’t shocking because it was  
sudden but rather because, for the great majority of Californians,  
Worthington wasn’t someone who appeared on television—he was a  
character who seemed to live inside television."

"In a similar vein as Klepper, Brian McHale states that "the very  
world of Vineland, the outside 'real world' existing independently of  
any particular character's consciousness of it, is itself modeled on  
TV."(123) He perceives that the world of Vineland is partitioned into  
various "regions" and associated with certain televisual genres which  
again are grouped around certain characters in the novel. So whenever  
Zoyd Wheeler is the center of the fictional world, this world seems to  
function according to sitcom-logic, Brock Vond transforms everything  
around him into a cop-show, and Frenesi and Flash live under soap  
opera circumstances. Each genre-world functions with a different set  
of psychological, sometimes even physical laws and norms. McHale's  
metaphor for the rapid and often imperceptible switching between these  
worlds is zapping."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEzdmcbsU_U


>> On Saturday, October 12, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/10/09/death-of-a-salesman/
>> http://home.foni.net/~vhummel/Image-Fiction/chapter_4.1.1.html
>

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l