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.

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.

Publication Type:	Journal Article
Publisher:	English Dept., University of Adelaide
Copyright:	1986 The Authors
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/9648

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