The Crisis of Western Culture in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow

Abstract

According to the American novelist John Barth, commenting on the term in 1980, postmodernism was essentially an elaboration of cultural modernism, a way of telling stories. By 1990, al though the term has spilled out of the boundaries of l iterary critical debate, it still carries with it this earl ier sense, but the stories are now indistinguishable from what was once assumed to be knowledge: scientific truth, ethics, law, history.