What the fuck did I just read, exactly?
A decadent magniloquence, a feast for the pseuds, a meme.
postmodernism completely lacks humanity.
>>24742672What are you talking about
If you never did the Kenosha kid, you are filtered.
>>24742715postmodern books lack humanity retardit's listening to music for the mix rather than for the songthere's no human touch or emotion in any of the storiesbunch of bullshit
>>24742783>it just doesn't have SOUL brook so you're both stupid and inarticulate
>>24742783Mixes are done by humans.
>>24742783But GR is full of emotion bro
>>24742783Postmodern literature presupposes the reader.
>>24742829I don’t read to be presupposed
>>24742829Pretty much this. Modernism was literature's turn inward to explore society through the individual, postmodernism is literature's explosion outward to explore the individual through society. >>24742855I don't think you know what "presupposed" means. To translate into meme, the humanity was you all along.
>>24742672>>24742783This is what I initially thought, and still do to some extent, at least regarding this specific book...I personally didn't find much actual depth in the characters, for example. But you fail to realize that we are at such a point where there's so much media and so many stories already, that art is as much about the "how" as it is about the "what". This book is absolutely phenomenal as far as technicality and level of prose goes, and it makes for a delightful reading experience >>24742824I actually read it in Finnish, and I'm surprised to see how easily it reads in English. Maybe we have just big words inherently, but there might have been some additional artistic eloquence mixed in
>>24742608Jonathan Blow's favorite book
>>24742951>This is what I initially thought, and still do to some extent, at least regarding this specific bookAs the previous comments pointed out, post modernism explores the individual through society, really the larger structures which shape and define our lives including literature itself. This requires a certain removal from the empathetic mode which had dominated literature since realism, to take a step back so we can see the larger picture and the largely insignificant role we play in it. So the character ceases to be an appeal and becomes a cog. Humanity has created a world so complex that the old gods can no longer offer satisfactory explanations and the old world is simple by comparison, almost trivial, something we can explain and understand; we no longer need the old gods to explain that world to us and those old gods offer very little to understand the world we created, a world no individual can understand. This is what the main characters in GR are realizing; the war had given them meaning and something to believe in, something they could understand, and then it ended leaving them adrift in mans creation. Most quickly find something else, they latch onto what ever they can, Slothrop tries to understand, tries to touch god. I don't understand how anyone can think this lacks humanity, it is humanity. We can not live without belief in something, it protects us from what we can not comprehend. Our creations have exceeded those of the gods, a swarm of locust or a flood is nothing compared to the bomb.
>>24743073I see, interesting analysis. It's probably a question of my contextual illiteracy which makes me blind to these kind of things. I can, in retrospect, definitely see how that was a sentiment Pynchon was going for, it does come up in the text. Nevertheless it's still very hard to grasp these things, not having read a lot of books, not knowing what postmodernism even is before this book...in my opinion, a book should ideally be accessible and meaningful to all people, even those without the immediate ability to look at it through a specific lens...so it's not necessarily a detriment per se, but might have the effect of seeming to lack depth for a lot of people
>>24743220Pynchon and the post modernist where not writing for the general public, they were writing for those people who want to see what can be done with literature if it is not constrained by anything but the printed page and the author's skill. But GR is accessible and will be meaningful to anyone who is willing to put in the time to learn about literature beyond what their general education prepared them for. Pynchon's methods allowed him to explore the topic in far greater depth than he could have by more traditional means, it allowed him to leverage everything in the novel towards his goal, offer more than just a character eyed view. Pynchon and much of the post modernism is just an simple evolution of Naturalism, acknowledgement that in context of literature it is language that is natural; plot, character, etc are all contrivances. The general structures methods that underpin post modernism are those of Naturalism.
>>24742824>pidgin
>>24743330>Pynchon and much of the post modernism is just an simple evolution of Naturalism, acknowledgement that in context of literature it is language that is natural; plot, character, etc are all contrivances.That was poorly worded. The acknowledgement was that the Naturalists failed at their goal because they pretended that things like plot and character are natural to literature when they are not, that they are no more natural than any other literary device.
>>24742824Nice passage anon
>>24743330>The general structures methods that underpin post modernism are those of Naturalism.And those would be?
>>24743479Repetition and variation at the thematic level. Before the Naturalists, literature generally had one or two instances of theme and they tended to track along right with plot. Naturalists came along and made every chapter or section in the novel into its own self contained instance of the novel's theme, so we get many variations and an evolution of theme. Postmodernists said any literary device or convention can be used as a self contained instance of theme, not just plot or character or chapter, anything, even a single word. The trick to understanding much of postmodern fiction is to find the repetitions, then find the variation in the repetitions, find some sort of commonality between them all, and you will be in the ballpack. The Naturalist/pomo ways have since become fairly common.
>>24742608A novel about the beginning of the Cold War, and the onset of nuclear paranoia. It's hard to explain to zoomers, but this was a pretty big thing at the time of writing.
>>24742824I'd also point to the scene where Roger and Jessica's tryst gets interrupted by the dropping of a bomb and the whole paragraph leading to death announcing its presence again and telling them to "try and tickle me", the end of Beyond the Zero with Roger thinking about Jessica inevitably moving on from him and the sadness of the whole situation, and the part where Pointsman is reflecting on his dead friends at the Christmas party and his own lack of fulfillment with women and his ambiguous hatred of Slothrop for being inadvertently responsible for killing his friends as good examples of emotion and interiority in Gravity's Rainbow that I can think of offhand. Also, the end of the Franz Pokler chapter.
I like this book because my dad was a missile launcher.
>>24742672Can you explain what is post-modern about this book?
>that part where Ilse dreams about starting a colony on the moonmust have been weird being Neil Armstrong and reading all that stuff
>>24746196nta but, it can not be analyzed through the tools of any of the prior schools of criticism/theory. This is the standard these days and analyzing literature purely with the tools of a single school is just an undergrad exercise at this point. The post modern authors are those whose work forced the single school of criticism/theory to admit defeat and those authors who directly and myopically descend from that original batch of postmodernists. Pynchon is the author who took postmodernist lit from academic to the masses and was the final nail in the coffin of the entire idea of a single dominant school, no one could ignore the truth after GR, unless they wanted to end up like Slothrop.
>>24746196You can't know nuffin
