Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk

by Joseph Tabbi

Overview

Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801430749
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/29/1995
Series:	6/28/2002
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph Tabbi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is editor of the Electronic Book Review.

What People are Saying About This

William R. Paulson

Tabbi offers a subtleimportant, and complex argument, delivered in clear and forceful prose, about some of the most crucial issues in fiction today.

Tom LeClair

Tabbi's major contribution is resurrecting a concept of the sublime—which creates a new intellectual arc from Henry Adams to Kathy Acker and an interesting new grouping of American novelists. The chapters on McElroy's Plus and DeLillo's Libra and Mao II are the best criticism I know of these books and Tabbi's original readings of Gravity's Rainbow and An American Dream make it hard to think about Pynchon and Mailer in the same way as before.

Stuart Peterfreund

An important book, one that will be read, reread, and valued for its depth, lucidity, and courage.

Editorial Reviews

Postmodern Sublime achieves the same goal it sets out for the writers it studies: to move readers.... An intellectual page-turner, this book represents an important and profound insight into the latest incarnation of the 'sacred national order,' the technological sublime, and how one might live with it.

Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Tabbi's major contribution is resurrecting a concept of the sublime—which creates a new intellectual arc from Henry Adams to Kathy Acker and an interesting new grouping of American novelists. The chapters on McElroy's Plus and DeLillo's Libra and Mao II are the best criticism I know of these books and Tabbi's original readings of Gravity's Rainbow and An American Dream make it hard to think about Pynchon and Mailer in the same way as before."

Tom LeClair

"Tabbi offers a subtleimportant, and complex argument, delivered in clear and forceful prose, about some of the most crucial issues in fiction today."

William R. Paulson

"An important book, one that will be read, reread, and valued for its depth, lucidity, and courage."

Stuart Peterfreund

Working from literary treatments of the machine back through manuscripts, journalistic accounts, and interviews to the theoretical ideas behind them, Tabbi (English, Kansas State U.) finds a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology that has produced Technological Sublime as a new mode of modern writing. He focuses on concepts of language, reality, and identity in the work of Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElfoy, and Don DeLillo. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Postmodern Sublime achieves the same goal it sets out for the writers it studies: to move readers.... An intellectual page-turner, this book represents an important and profound insight into the latest incarnation of the 'sacred national order, ' the technological sublime, and how one might live with it.

-- "Review of Contemporary Fiction"

From the Publisher