UMd Pynchon/DeLillo Class

[Greg_Jensen at boglsea2.ccmail.compuserve.com]

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Date: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 12:19:56 -0700 
From: Ken Jones <kenj at cadence.com>
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To: lej1rxm at lej10.med.navy.mil, wll1 at axe.humboldt.edu 
Subject: Re: UMd Pynchon/DeLillo Class
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>Which brings up the question: has anyone here ever taken (or know 
>of someone who's taken) a course in which the entire GR was 
>assigned?
     


My senior year as an English major at Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA), we were
assigned to read all of GR over the course of a semester as part of a senior 
English seminar.  During that time we read works by other so-called post-modern 
authors from various countries.  These included  D.M. Thomas' _The White Hotel_,
Thomas Bernhard's _The Lime Works_, Ruth P. Jhabvala's _Heat & Dust_, Gabriel 
Garcia Marquez' _One Hundred Years of Solitude_(of course) and others I can no 
longer recall.  This was about six years ago.  The idea was that we would go 
through the novels mentioned above, one after the other and in fairly quick 
succession, while also systematically working our way through GR, which we 
discussed only once a week.  Each week when we discussed that week's particular 
section of GR,  two students were assigned to lead the discussion.  As you can 
probably imagine, the results were as varied as the students assigned to present
the sections.  Some people just plain folded.  They didn't know what to do with 
or make of the book.  It made more than a few people uncomfortable to discuss 
the book in class.  The professor was great, though, in letting the class go 
quiet if that's what it was going to do with the discussion.  It only made us 
reflect even more on just what kind of book we were trying to read.  It also had
lasting effects outside of the class as well.  We talked about it in the library
and the hallways and at parties.  And other seniors who weren't in the class 
started hearing about The Book and The Class and our discussions of both.  Even 
though I'm sure that every last one of us in that class was probably totally 
unprepared to handle a book the size and scope of GR, it brought us together in 
a weird, uncomfortable, but lasting way, that made us all feel like we'd been 
through something that had changed us, even if some of us weren't exactly happy 
with the way in which we'd been changed.

I talked to the professor who lead the class a couple years after I graduated.  
He told me that he'd done the class again, but, for whatever reason, it really 
hadn't gone over in the same way it had when I'd taken the class.