Postmodernism (was Re: Wolfe a conservative writer?)

Adam Stephanides · 08 Dec 2000, 17:25 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: (urth) Postmodernism (was Re: Wolfe a conservative writer?)
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 17:25:12
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0179 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0179.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Alex David Groce wrote:
>=20
> Adam wrote:
>=20
> > And for this very reason, that prototypical postmodernist John Barth
> > has also adopted the _Thousand Nights and a Night_ as a model.  Not
> > to mention the postmodernist tour de force THE ARABIAN NIGHTMARE by
> > Robert Irwin (whose book on _The Thousand Nights and a Night_,
> > entitled something like THE ARABIAN NIGHTS: A COMPANION, I highly
> > recommend).
>=20
> Hmmm...  This seems to bring us back to the whole question of how to
> know postmodernism (and without the aid of a SF oracle like Damon
> Knight's finger).  Barth I will agree is postmodernist.  But notice
> that Wolfe, while he write about stories being told, telling
> themselves, etc., never (AFAIK) does the kind of metafictional
> introduction of himself that Barth does (in _Chimera_, for example).

Well, there was that one in STOREYS (iirc) about the author writing his
perfect story a word at a time; but I take your point.  But I wasn't
arguing that Wolfe is a postmodernist; I was arguing against the claim
that he is a "very conservative" writer, and the paragraph you quote was
merely an incidental point.  I really don't know if Wolfe is a
postmodernist or not, especially since I have no definition of
postmodernism, and the lines between postmodernism and modernism are
very fuzzy (which is ULYSSES?).

> Use of the 1001 Nights does not a postmodernist
> make--Proust and R. A. Lafferty are both frequent travelers to that
> territory, and Proust is a modernist and Lafferty is whatever on earth
> Lafferty is.

For what it's worth, I would say Lafferty is a postmodernist, among
other things.  I also don't think the 1001 Nights is that much of an
influence on him, aside from THE THIRTEENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and the
short story about the genie (and maybe a couple of others I've
forgotten).  I think he owes a lot more to American tall-tale
traditions, though he draws upon all sorts of legends.

> I'll agree that THE ARABIAN NIGHTMARE and PEACE have a
> _lot_ in common (though aiming at rather opposite visions, I think).

That actually hadn't occurred to me at all.  But now I'll have to think
about it.

> What makes THE ARABIAN NIGHTMARE postmodernist rather than modernist?

It's actually a while since I read it, and while I'm sure I
instinctively pegged it as postmodernist, I would have to reread it to
tell you why I thought so.  Why do you think it's modernist?

--Adam

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net