These poems lead us through a constellation of places: hotels, airports, cosmodromes, quarries, abandoned cities, vacated rooms—the dreamlike settings of past events that may or may not have occurred as we remember them. It is what remains when the fundamental categories of time, identity, and history no longer function reliably. In a world that has lost its center of gravity, we drift among the wreckage of value systems now decommissioned, laden with memories from a lost age. Although we survived the loss, we can no longer hold a stable form. While continuing to move, we no longer share a destination. We are an intermittent community, made up of fleeting trajectories that brush up against each other before disappearing into the openness of a universe which, though increasingly difficult to inhabit, is the only one we can call home.
Del 92 - Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature
Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi examines the recurrence of violent body figuration in the fiction of Pynchon, Puig, and Volponi, and also 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.