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Pynchon's Postmodern Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marc W. Redfield
Marc W. Redfield*
Affiliation:
University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland
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Abstract

Theoretical accounts of the “postmodern” have recently invoked the aesthetic category of the sublime, but without attending to the rhetorical complexities that the category names and conceals. This essay opens by considering disturbances legible in Fredric Jameson's proposal of a postmodern sublime, then goes on to consider narratives by Thomas Pynchon that interrogate and allegorize the burdens of such a proposition. From the early short stories to V. and Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's texts develop increasingly complex stagings of the sublime, putting into question the psychological and epistemological consolations that these scenarios exist to afford.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 2 , March 1989 , pp. 152 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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