Subject: Re: Sex and the mod/pomo debate
From: WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 02 1997 - 15:27:15 GMT
ahh buddy, SAI does subvert modernist conventions if you read it as I do
(with help from those dear Goldsteins, Bernice and Sanford
in their l970 article, "'SAI--Writing As discovery."). SAI can be seen as
a text that predicts the process writing revolution in the field of
composition with great insight. _English in America_ by richard Ohmann
came out in l976 and is still one of the best books to offer an overiew of
"the field." Anyway, SAI is in part, a sweet story because in it, Seymour
is still alive, but this sweetness is based on the experience of "A
Perfect Day for bananafish" so much so that the intertexuality of the
character seems more important than in other attempts to weave characters
together in ongoing stories by other authors. Indeed, Salinger's "family"
of intertexuality is still pretty much unmatched. Other writers have done
more, but not better. Salinger's families are alive and still powerfully
make us their postmodern members!
The more I think about this, the more I think postmodernism is just a term
though...subverting convention isn't an "ism," it's literature. That's
the real tradition in literature or at least how we best mark our reading
stream of living--by understanding why something new has subverted
previous conventions (as well as maintaing others), aren't we really
tapping the action of literature?
will
On Sat, 1 Mar 1997, Jon Tveite wrote:
>
> SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION is probably Salinger's most unconventional work,
> but it doesn't do a lot to subvert modernist conventions. Sure, it's
> wordy and fairly anti-narrative, but many of Faulkner's works include
> long, awkward epistles. Faulkner also makes many cross-references between
> different works in his fictional universe, and nobody's going to call him
> postmodern.
>
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