Recommended Reading

[Andrew Dinn]

LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu writes:

> Given Pynchon's religious, ethnic and academic roots, it could be useful
> to revisit some of the American "canon classics."  I'd suggest some pretty
> obvious ones--that I assume TRP studied as part of his standard curriculum
> at Cornell, if not earlier:

> THE SCARLET LETTER
> Jonathon Edwards--"Sinners in the hands of an angry God"
> Some other Hawthorne, eg. "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Cousin, Major
> Molineaux" MOBY DICK (also see Melville's less well-known ISRAEL POTTER)
> a lot of stuff by T.S. Eliot--but especially THE WASTELAND
> also read at least early poems by Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost!

Yep. You might also like to throw in Hawthorne's `The House of the
Seven Gables' for it's Pyncheons and its strange clash of olde worlde
with new technology and mores. And there's also Melville's `Piazza
Tales' and `The Confidence Man' - check out `Benito Cereno', `The
Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Old Maids', `Bartleby The
Scrivener' from the former and the whole of the latter for grand
conspiracies, paranoid readings of `reality', mechanization and
routinization of people's lives, economic and social manipulation on a
global scale, a nascent counterforce, etc etc. And finally, of course,
there is our old friend Henry Adams with both `The Education ...' and
`The Archangel and the Virgin' (oops make that `Mont St Michel and
Chartres').


Andrew Dinn
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