Research Catalog

Title

Irritable bodies and postmodern subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi / Giorgio Mobili.

Author

Mobili, Giorgio, 1973-

Publication

New York : Peter Lang, [2008], ©2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 220 pages; 24 cm.

Summary

"Irritable Bodied and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi examines the recurrence of violent body figuration in the fiction of Pynchon, Puig, and Volponi, as well as in the fiction of several other postmodern authors who published their literature during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Different as they may be, these authors engage in analogous representative strategies, as their prose is frequently and similarly disrupted by obscene images of wounded, torn, or deformed bodies. In their mix of irony and morbidity, in the hyper-reality of their depiction, in the unwarranted, apparently random nature of their occurrence, these shocking outbreaks exemplify an uncompromisingly "irritable" style which is one fundamental element of postmodernist representation. The author argues how through their fascination with obscene material, these writers address burning issues about the significance of the corporeal in a seemingly discourse-defined universe. This book is a great resource for literary graduate students who are interested in a comparative approach to contemporary literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Series Statement

Studies on themes and motifs in literature, 1056-3970 ; v. 92

Uniform Title

Studies on themes and motifs in literature ; v. 92.

Subjects

• Human body in literature
• Postmodernism (Literature)
• Fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Volponi, Paolo > Criticism and interpretation
• Puig, Manuel > Criticism and interpretation
• Pynchon, Thomas > Criticism and interpretation

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-220).

Contents

The Postmodern Thing -- Postmodernism: A "Remarkably Scattered Concept" -- The Unsettling Proximity of the Real: The Book of Daniel -- Courting Inanimateness: The Body Between Life and Death -- The "Dissociated Dance" of the Body-Transducer -- Body and Language: A Missed Encounter -- Ch. 1. Desire, the Body, and the Real in V -- Fetishism, Simulation, and the Horrifying Dance of the Real -- Acousmatique: The Voice of the Real -- The Golden Screw and the Site of the Real -- The Other Side of the Skin: The Real as the Reverse the Body -- Is the Stain Real? The Eye, the Gaze, and Anamorphosis -- Pynchon and Surrealism -- Drive and the Jouissance of Repression -- Repetition, Co-Implication, Double Articulation -- Gravity's Rainbow. The Noise of the Signifier -- Ch. 2. Faraway, So Close: Hyperreal Density and Disappearing Bodies in The Buenos Aires Affair -- The Obscene Siegfried and the Revealed Phallus -- The Missed Encounter of Sex and Representation -- Sex Between Lack and Excess -- Pornography and the Obscene -- Over-Proximity: The Fourth Dimension -- The Fading of the Subject -- The Disappearing Body -- Coda: Aphanisis Revisited -- Ch. 3. The Body Factor: Language, Corporeality, and Utopia in Il pianeta irritabile -- The Hole in the Face -- Metamorphosis and the Hyperreal -- Moribunds "Between two Deaths" -- The Acquarium of the Real -- Language, Irony, and the 'Two-Way Pull" -- Language Corporealized -- The Irritable Utopia -- The Excremental Language -- The Ending: Becoming Animal? -- Conclusion. "Something Rotten in Law": The Body, the Harrow, and the Perverse Core of the Symbolic.

ISBN

• 9780820497136 (alk. paper)
• 0820497134 (alk. paper)

LCCN

• 2007016399
• 40015085182

OCLC

• 123391060
• ocn123391060
• SCSB-5390058

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries