Gravity's rainbow and the Post-rhetorical

McHoul, A. and Wills, D. (1986) Gravity's rainbow and the Post-rhetorical. Southern Review , 19 (2). pp. 193-227.

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Abstract

Now everybody, we too, started reading Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. We haven't spoken to hitch-hikers in Arizona, like Siegal, but we've met a few who never got past the first hundred pages, like Leverenz. A Sydney film critic and feminist friend thought it was pretentious to be seen with a tattered copy at an academic conference and was surprised to meet someone who had not only actually read it but was almost through a second time. We thought the novel merited at least two readings, being perhaps the most important work of fiction of the second half of the century. And yet the literary-critical responses we read failed to do justice to its importance. Certainly they sang its praises but this amounted finally to little more than a dry and repetitive litany. They failed, it seemed to us, to provide the analytic framework that might delineate the novel's difference.