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Acknowledgments
Published on 13 Apr 2006 at 2:17 pm.
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Any text such as this one owes its existence to countless individuals and institutions that have supported its coming into being, and any expression of gratitude seems destined for inadequacy. Such an inadequacy in what follows should be understood as a failure in the expression, rather than the absence, of sincere emotion.
This project has […]
Chapter 1: Three Discourses on the Age of Television
Published on 13 Apr 2006 at 6:48 am.
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The Postmodernist Writer
So, to recap: The anxiety of obsolescence, a cultural pose struck by the beleaguered postmodern novelist, has at its root three discourses with which it is mutually constitutive. These discourses—the death of the novel, the threat of new technologies, and the rise of postmodernism—all bespeak obsolescence in the interest of creating a […]
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Chapter 1: Three Discourses on the Age of Television
Published on 13 Apr 2006 at 6:01 am.
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Postmodernism Is (What Postmodernism Is)
In the meantime, there is postmodernism to contend with. In certain arguably suspect ways, the foregoing sections of this chapter, as well as the remainder of this volume, refer to “postmodernism” as if it were an already-defined, well-established, universally agreed-upon thing. Which, from one perspective, it is: in its popular usages, […]
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Chapter 1: Three Discourses on the Age of Television
Published on 13 Apr 2006 at 5:43 am.
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The Media in the Garden
As I’ve already indicated, the novel is hardly the sole literary form whose death has been critically mourned; one might similarly investigate the “ends” of the epic, the long poem, the sonnet, the drama in verse, the tragedy, poetry and the theatre altogether, the belletristic essay, and the literary letter. Each […]
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Chapter 1: Three Discourses on the Age of Television
Published on 12 Apr 2006 at 12:28 pm.
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The Novel Is Dead. Long Live the Novel.
The novel has been dead for nearly as long as it has been alive. Its very name reveals part of the problem it faces: the genre’s practitioners have felt throughout its history the pressures of newness. In the words of William Hill Brown, the author of what is […]
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Index
Published on 12 Apr 2006 at 11:24 am.
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Abernethy, Peter, 161, 176, 246n. 18
academia
anxiety of obsolescence within, 8, 41-42, 218, 236nn. 9, 11
critique of in White Noise, 103-106, 117, 120-25, 148, 243n. 22, 246 n. 21
Acker, Kathy, 48, 206
advertising, 107-108, 112, 116-17, 124, 242n. 9
alienation, 58-61, 71, 83, 89, 208-209
Althusser, Louis, 113, 177-78
Anderson, Perry, 42-44, 238n. 35
Antrim, Donald, 207-208
anxiety of obsolescence
discursive construction of, […]
Bibliography
Published on 12 Apr 2006 at 11:24 am.
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Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” In Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. 67–81.
Abernethy, Peter. “Entropy in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Critique 14.2 (1972): 18–33.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. […]
Chapter 5: Obsolescence, the Marginal, and the Popular
Published on 12 Apr 2006 at 11:22 am.
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Pynchon and DeLillo were ahead of their time.
—David Foster Wallace
Thomas Pynchon. Now there was someone you never saw on “Oprah Winfrey.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Anxiety of Obsolescence, Reconsidered
Throughout this book, my intent has been to explore a particular group of postmodern novels by arguing not merely for a specific way of reading […]
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Chapter 4: Network
Published on 12 Apr 2006 at 11:21 am.
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Everything is connected, but some things are more connected than others.
—Howard Pattee
Fergus Mixolydian in Pynchon’s V. and David Bell in DeLillo’s Americana, in their peculiar relationships to the television set, reveal the anxieties about mechanicity and visuality explored in the novel of obsolescence; each allows the novelist room to explore the putative threat that […]
Chapter 3: Spectacle
Published on 12 Apr 2006 at 11:20 am.
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Seeing comes before words.
—John Berger
Let us begin with a brief return to the scene from DeLillo’s Americana referenced in the last chapter, David Bell sitting before his television set:
I looked at the TV screen for a moment and then found myself in a chair about a foot away from the set, watching intently. I […]
