AtD and more: Fredric Jameson on SF

[Mark Kohut]

I'm going to pick up on just one aspect of Jameson's words on this
theorist as they, at least tangentially, touch on a slice of Pynchon.

The camera gave us a snapshot of time past. When we looked at a
picture, we were in some sense, time-travelling. FJ links to
modernism.
Pynchon, in the works, shows cameras/photos doing that. The ATD scene
where the natural European peasant cannot watch
a movie, the pictures filling him with "all that is solid melting into
air"...that Marx phrase used to describe modernity.
It seems Pynchon does link similar judgments to modernity. About which
Modernism tried to deal with, as FJ sez.



On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Science fiction is not the only mass-cultural genre (or subgenre) whose
> relationship to ‘high literature’ and to modernism in particular presents
> problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it
> is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any
> family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or
> Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments
> become more difficult to sustain, or even to articulate. Experimental
> literature ought to share generic features with its more popular cousins,
> but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same
> genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’."
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l