BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    "Opening children's eyes": overloaded forms and the didactic function

    Eve, Martin Paul (2012) "Opening children's eyes": overloaded forms and the didactic function. In: English Literature Research Seminar, 28 Nov 2012, London, UK. (Unpublished)

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    2012-11-21 - CryptoDidacticism.pdf
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

    Download (128kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    Since Pynchon, the postmodern encyclopaedic form has been recognised as possessing an ethical core. Indeed, Gravity?s Rainbow was only briefly treated solely as a structure of interminable play and quickly found its place, especially in light of Pynchon?s other novels, as a politicised work focusing on the military-industrial complex and contemporary America. It can equally be asserted, though, that the ?ethical turn? in literary studies is sited at a specific, historicized moment and is not without its own problems: when we say ?ethical?, rather than ?moralising?, are we, in fact, merely refusing to recognise the relativity and transitivity of our own moral strictures? To begin to formulate a less innocent, more experienced, new terminology for this mode, this paper will look at two overloaded works, Thomas Pynchon?s Gravity?s Rainbow and Roberto Bolaño?s 2666. Through an analysis of these immense, torrential novels, I will unearth their inherent didactic function, examine the way in which they conscript our intellectual capital to pre-dispose us towards their ethics and draw out the place of teaching and learning, through the representation of the university and academia, in these texts. It seems to me that the ethical stances of both these texts are important, compassionate and fundamentally correct. This could be, however, because I have been pre-ensnared by their crypto-didactic mode. A piece examining the didacticism inherent in Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Contemporary Literature, Centre for
    Depositing User: Martin Eve
    Date Deposited: 28 Jul 2015 09:17
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:36
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12242

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    323Downloads
    6 month trend
    412Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item