Josh, you have written an incredibly insightful blog posting, one that shall be a worthy result of a Google search for the word “what-me-worryism.” Unfortunately, owing to the fact that you so thoroughly covered the topic and didn’t present a follow-up question, I shall, from this point on, abandon it altogether.
I have a general question about the class, one that has been troubling me (in one form or another) for a number of years now. Dr. Sample has gone through great pains to credit his sources (even the images in his PowerPoint), to ensure that living authors receive royalties for the works we read, and to reiterate the conventions of MLA. However, in light of Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author,” Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Minard, Author of Don Quixote,” The photographs of Sherrie Levine, and Raymond Federman’s experiments in “play-gerism,” isn’t this decidedly un-postmodern? Isn’t the very concept of pastiche, mashing or the simulacral Vegas landscape predicated upon the appropriation of texts? I, of course, realize that for the sake of academic ethics, not to mention survival, we should be credited for our work, but my question still remains. Why is it acceptable to “sample” but not to plagiarize? It’s alright for the Coen Brothers to steal whole personas from Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday” in order to make “The Hudsucker Proxy,” for Lucas and Spielberg to borrow from Kurosawa. When is it postmodernism, and when is it stealing?
With that being said, I would like to present a second question, one about CoL49. As Dr. Sample pointed out, challenging the “postmoderness” of a text is futile, yet, I wonder what about this text warrants its inclusion in a class entitled “American Postmodernism.” Though we have only had a brief discussion as to the definition of the term, I will proffer my opinions and anxiously await your responses.
1. This book, as Dr. Sample articulated, “revels in pop-culture.” Whether it is a rock band, 1960’s drug culture, or the appropriation of the detective novel, Pynchon makes use of these tropes to trouble the high/low distinction.
2. This text is a critique of modern reason. Unlike the traditional detective story, Oedipa finds no resolution. In fact, each clue only further complicates the mystery at hand. Moreover, the little mysteries in the book (i.e. the significance of the ridiculous names, symbols, radio station call letters (which spell obscene words when reversed) or acronyms) remain a mystery by the end. This would speak to our fellow student’s complaint (I am terrible with names) about the lack of “truth.”
3. While I didn’t notice an obscene amount of intertextuality, the book makes reference to Nabokov’s Lolita. This is significant as Lolita, in some sense, is another postmodern anti-detective story. Is Pynchon referencing an author who is known for his own intertextual references?
I never know how to end these things.