Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon.~(book reviews)

Publication: Contemporary Literature

Publication Date: 22-JUN-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Wisconsin Press

The phenomenon of applied poststructuralist criticism is at best a slippery concept. On the one hand, the critic invariably acknowledges an author's exercise of deconstruction - how the author exposes the logocentricity of some positivist or humanist premise based on the privileging of such positions as presence, writing, and visualization over absence, speech, and phantasm. In this context the critic reveals the author's strategy to destabilize, to invert the binary terms in order to displace or remove the very possibility of metaphysical grounds for distinguishing between what is central and what is marginal. Since it is an exposition of another author's deconstruction, however, applied poststructuralist criticism also assumes another strategy. Instead of simply acknowledging destabilization, the critic finally must reformulate the polysemy of texts according to some deep principle from which the understanding of these texts necessarily follows. Irrespective of the radical manifestos it draws on for its content, applied poststructuralist criticism invariably legitimates its claims for knowledge on the hoariest of logocentric principles - the predictive power of a theoretical construct creating a sensible idealization of complicated phenomena. The resulting tension reveals the dilemma of applied poststructuralist criticism: foundationalist assumptions undergird applied theory, even ones whose superstructure acknowledges inherent ambiguity. The theory may reveal something about contemporary thought, it may explore primary texts in insightful ways, but finally it begs the question that one can represent texts in some shorthand form while maintaining the...

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