Although it sounds like an inherently noble goal, providing more people with access to more information will not necessarily promote print-based literacy and could actually do more harm than good by proliferating opportunities for oligarchs to circulate misinformation designed to confuse and distract the wired, but functionally illiterate multitude. People need to be educated – and to educate themselves -about how to access, analyze, and assess the validity and the relevance of the multiplicity of information that’s so readily available in the networked society. Although it sounds like an inhe… continue

Pynchon is the subject of discussion in two 2007/8 reviews: Beginning with a discussion of paranoia’s centrality to critical work on Pynchon, Timothy Melley’s review of John Farrell’s Paranoia and Modernity considers the historical importance of paranoia to the Western mind. In his 2006 ebr essay, McHale returns to Pynchon and to postmodernism to reflect on earlier approaches to the movement Pynchon is the subject of discussion in two 2007/8 reviews: Beginning with a discussion of paranoia’s centrality to critical work on Pynchon, Timothy Melley’s review of John Farrell’s Paranoia and Modernit… continue

For a rigorous critique of Toni Morrison’s literary postmodernism, see Madhu Dubey’s indespensible Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (U of Chicago Press, 2003). Dubey challenges the conservatism of Morrison’s southern folk aesthetic on the grounds that it naively valorizes a premodern, black, southern, and female, oral tradition as an imaginary solution to problems associated with the alienating experience of modernization – particularly urbanization and print-based literacy. For a rigorous critique of Toni Morrison’s literary postmodernism, see Madhu Dubey’s indespensible Signs a… continue

Karen, we could say, effectively transforms the signs by which we come to know people into objects of perception rather than objects of understanding. According to Walter Benn Michaels, this transformation of the intentional, and thus meaningful, sign into the unintentional, and thus meaningless, mark constitutes the ur-logic of postmodern thought, which is distinguished by its irrational privileging of affective experience over cognitive beliefs. Karen, we could say, effectively transforms the signs by which we come to know people into objects of perception rather than objects of understandin… continue

Not only white male authors are wary about television’s impact on the technologizing of the word: In her first public address after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, reluctant feminist icon Doris Lessing deplored the mass media’s effects on literary production. Not only white male authors are wary about television’s impact on the technologizing of the word: In her first public address after winning the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, reluctant feminist icon Doris Lessing deplored the mass media’s effects on literary production. Promising new authors, particularly attractive young wom… continue