i'm a very very complex person

I'm at work, so I don't have a whole lot of time, but I wanted to briefly make note of two very interesting articles that I read recently. Both were from the New Yorker, and both were from the same issue, although I unfortunately do not remember which issue it was. The first one that I read was a long piece by Jonathan Franzen dealing with difficulty in literature, and the second was an in-depth profile of Harold Bloom, controversial literary critic/scholar extraordinaire. Taken together, the two articles represent a rather forceful repudiation of many of the basic tenets of postmodernism. Very interesting. I took a class on postmodern literature when I was in England, and I loved the class, the professor, the reading list... All in all, it was one of the best academic experiences of my life. That class sparked an interest in postmodernism for me, as well as introducing me to several authors whom I pursued on my own. So I have some experience with postmodern literature, and I enjoyed most of what I read. However, I have to confess that I enjoyed it for distinctly non-postmodern reasons! There were characters that appealed to me, and lovely writing that I enjoyed, and tangled webs of plot that were fun to sort out... All the things that true postmodern people were supposed to disdain and view as simply so much artifice. Nonetheless, I also enjoyed the more orthodox postmodern stuff: the way the authors introduced uncertainty into their texts, the questions that they raised, they way they seemed to be willing to have fun at the expense of their own books even as they were writing them. So I clearly have an interesting relationship to postmodern literature and to the whole notion of exactly what postmodernism is. I haven't yet sorted it out completely, but those two articles were certainly interesting for me.

In other news, I am about halfway through -The Vision of Emma Blau-. I am enjoying it, but it's definitely a slow book rather than a page turner. That doesn't mean it's not enjoyable, it's just a different kind of enjoyment.