Teaching TRP

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

>Some weeks ago someone on the list raised a question about the use of CL49
>in the classroom.  Not only do I think it a reasonable way to introduce
>students to P in courses where really reading V or GR might preclude
>reading any other book in the syllabus, but I also think that it's a great
>means for an imaginative professor to teach students about the fine art of
>re-reading.  I'd like to see a professor assign a book like CL49 to be read
>twice.  It's just complicated and confusing enough to puzzle most everybody
>the first time around while being considerably more accessible the second
>time around.  
>
>Do any professors encourage re-reading in their own courses?  I can't
>recall any such foax among the bunch I know.  Most professors I know
>"over-assigned," going for quantity rather than quality of reading and
>analysis.

I'll be teaching Pynchon (with help from several others)
over nine months next year to a group of perhaps twenty-five or 
thirty students and faculty. It is partly an attempt to deal with the
problem of "over-assignment," which I think prevents in practice
the kind of  careful, attentive reading which I find most valuable.

 Given the extra-ordinary length of time we shall have to consider
the opus, questions arise as to which approach is more valueable
---reading everything twice (from Slow Learner through Mason 
Dixon between October and Febuary, and repeating from Febuary
 to June), or once very slowly. 

The other thing we'll be doing is breaking our three-hour-a-week
session in half, with a coffee break in the middle and wine at the end.
One half of the sessions can allow for close seminar reading,
while the other half can feature talks on various aspects of particular 
novels or Pynchon's work as a whole, from UL faculty and a variety of
PIPS visiting fellows and invited guests.

Anyone wishing to take part or contribute in any way  should 
e-mail me; any suggestions for approaches to handling this 
experiement are welcome and would be gladly recieved
over the P-list.
Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk