interesting book

[mishl001 at maroon.tc.umn.edu]

On the chance that it's not widely known I'd like to call attention to 
an interesting work that I just picked up, The Birth of Modernism by 
Leon Surette, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993.  Here are some 
sentences from the Preface:

When I wrote A Light from Eleusis: A Study of the Cantos of Ezra Pound 
in the mid-1970s, I held the conventional view that literary modernism 
belonged to twentieth century scientific materialism.  On this view, 
the mythological and Eleusinian elements of such representative 
modernist works as The Waste Land and the Cantos were consideered to 
be factitious formal and thematic devices.  This aestheticization of 
the apparently mystical or noumal content of literary modernism was 
achieved through the tactic of Joyce's so-called mythological method.  
The argument of The Birth of Modernism is taht the ubiquity of myth in 
modenist literature must be attributed at least in part to the occult 
belief that myths represent a record of contact between mortals and 
the au dela.

The book has chapters on Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Nietzsche, and Wagner.  

Given the presence of all these writers in the subtext of Gravity's 
Rainbow, as well as the kind of border crossings that occur, I would 
bet that most Pynchon readers would be interested by Surette's book.

Bill M.