ENG 580: Literary PoMo I'm gonna make you an offer you can't understand...

Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition

This is a text I've read for a class on composition theory; however, it's also got some interesting analysis of where postmodern theory is in general. Lester Faigley offers a great historographic review of postmodernity.

Faigley's introduction includes the following excerpt from a 1988 Rolling Stone interview with Don DeLillo: "the interviewer, Anthony DeCurtis asked: 'There's something of an apocalyptic feel about your books, an intimation that our world is moving toward greater randomness and dissolution, or maybe even cataclysm. Do you see this process as irreversible?' DeLillo answered: ' This is the shape my books take because this is the reality I see. This reality has become part of all of our lives over the past 25 years. I don't know how we can deny it.' DeLillo's date for the beginning of our current era of randomness and dissolution is 1963, the year of John F. Kennedy's assassination that is the subject of DeLillo's novel, _Libra_. DeLillo says that 'what's been missing over these past 25 years is a sense of a manageable reality... We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then.'"