FLG Gives Little Thought To Post-Modernist Literature

...but Matt Zeitlin addresses one of FLG's pet peeves:

A recurring — and somewhat frustrating — trope in a lot of popular and middlebrow writing about literature is the constant identification of “postmodern” devices and techniques in old or canonical works of literature.

[...]

Non-linear narratives simply aren’t that strange and the fact that they were able to be used in works whose purpose was to justify state-building (Beowulf, the Aeneid) only goes to show how non-transgressive they are. The stuff that happens in, say, Gravity’s Rainbow is genuinely confusing in a way that Gabriel’s recounting of the war in heaven in Paradise Lost* is not.