America as Discourse
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8896028 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gary Waller (corresponding author), Gary F Waller |
| Year | 1983 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 207-218 |
| Publication date | 1983-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-014-02-08 |
| OpenAlex | W2017838649 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
David Cowart. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1980.154 + ix pp. James M. Mellard. The Exploded Form : The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1980. 208 + xv pp. Sanford Pinsker. Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960s. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1980.139 + x pp. Thomas Hill Schaub. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1981. 165 + x pp. John 0. Stark. Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 183 + ix pp. Mark Royden Winchell. Joan Didion. Boston : Twayne Publishers. 1980. 185 pp. America doesn't exist. I know—I've lived there. (Alain Resnais: Mon Oncle dAmérique) Toto. I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.... (Dorothy arriving in Oz: epigraph to Part 3 of Gravity's Rainbow) "Why... is everybody so interested in texts?" ( The Crying of Lot 49) "If," Roland Barthes asserted in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, "by some unimaginable excess"' all but one of our learned disciplines "were to be expelled from our education sys- tem, it is the discipline of Literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences, are present in the literary monument."' That is a large claim and, coming from the iconoclastic semiologist of S/Z and Le Plaisir du Texte, gratifyingly soothing to beleaguered humanists. It is after all in part because of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and other members of the French nouvelle critique that the much-cherished American insistence on the autonomy of the literary text and the uniqueness of the artistic vision has been so disturbingly and fundamentally challenged in recent years. With Barthes on our side after all, are we perhaps permitted to see texts as more than nodes within differential networks of significance carrying with them an illimitable force of multiple, disseminated meaning? Perhaps we can cau- tiously continue to privilege "literature" as society's unusually acute under- standing (or lack of understanding) of itself? Celebrating the festival of words, we might after all learn to cheat the facticity of the world
Allusion · American literature · Art · Art history · Epigraph · Humanism · Literature · Theology · Classics · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |