gnostic and Gnostic

[jbor]

monroe:
> Pynchon was very
>> unlikely to have been influenced by Derrida's particular
>> deconstruction(s)

No-one here has said that he was. That particular "knife-fight" has all been
just shadow-play on your part.

> though JD certainly did present
>> that paper @ JHU in 1966, it wasn't widely available, if one can call
>> any pub. of the proceedings of an academic conference "widely
>> available," 'til, what, 1972?

I suspect that the good people at Johns Hopkins might contest your glib
dismissal of the significance of Derrida's 1966 presentation there (I
believe he just sent the paper, though I could be wrong on this; I don't
think he traversed the Atlantic to teach there until several years later).
To have been invited to contribute in the first place means that *someone*
was aware of what he was about, wouldn't you think?

There is an interesting essay on the legacy of Derrida's paper, and
subsequent misprisions about and (deliberate) misunderstandings of the
practice of deconstruction, here:

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.199/9.2morrissey.t
xt

Mary Klages has a good reading guide here:

http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/2derrida.html

And there is a briefer summary here:

http://courses.lib.odu.edu/engl/cbrooke/aacra/derridaessay.htm

At any rate, Barthes' 'Death of the Author' and _S/Z_ *were* churning about
in the American litcrit mainstream by 1969-1970 at least, and Bakhtin was in
the process of getting himself rediscovered throughout the 60s and his works
were appearing in English from 1968.

> deconstruction, at least, is not only
>> as much a demonstration of how a text deconstructs even, esp. as it
>> ostensibly constructs itself, but might well be charaterized as, if,
>> esp., not as a reconstruction, a reconfiguration of the deconstructed
>> text.

I guess the gap between the two ends of the spectrum (reader-response to
deconstruction) -- as I see it -- is most concisely exemplified by your
attempted "reconstruction" of Benny Profane as some foppish Wildean flaneur,
and David Simpson's "deconstruction" of this (overtly tagged as such by
Pynchon) schlemihl-figure by reference to Chaplin, Magoo &c.

Frederick Karl has some good stuff on the schlemihl-as-American-pícaro in
his _American Fictions 1940-1980_, citing the protagonists of I.B. Singer,
Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Ellison's "Invisible Man" -- as well as Benny --
as exemplars. Karl describes the schlemihl as a "fool or passive individual
whose very resistance and fixedness become a threat to the status quo", a
version of the 'holy innocent', and notes how this character-type must "try
to escape damnation in the prairie, mountains, desert; or in recesses,
holes, and underground refuges offered by large cities." (pp 36, 84, 306)


----------
>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: gnostic and Gnostic
>Date: Fri, Dec 22, 2000, 3:19 AM
>