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Lorentzen / Nicklaus lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de
Sat May 6 04:05:22 CDT 2000


Ian Demsky schrieb:

> My last semester in college I worked on a Indepent Study Project on
> Gravity's Rainbow and Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott,
> etc.). 

  ... well, i just read some outtakes from thoreau's beautiful diaries, but a   
  deep grounded love for the woods, the living trees, seems to be something   
  thoreau and pynchon share with each other ... kai


> I found a similarity between Paranoia (looking for the hidden
> connections) and Emerson's idea that reality was a tapestry... and we
> could only see the backside of the tapestry, the threads and knots and
> stitches that connect everything... and we look at the back of the
> tapestry and imagine what the front (the truth) must look like...
>
> I also think that Gravity's Rainbow encourages modes of reading that are
> Transcendental, i.e. Paranoid.  The way the book it written it demands a
> type of reading that I believe was demanded by the Transcendentalists: a
> suspicous reading, where we are aware of the way the text is written (and
> woven) as much as we are of the "story line".  Pynchon demands that
> everything be examined, questioned, tasted... from the characters' names
> to historical & literary references.  This program of "active" reading was
> emphasized by the Transcendentalists in quite a few places (cf. Emerson's
> "Self-Reliance" & "The American Scholar").  
>
> I also believe that M&D picks up this theme and runs with it... but I
> wan't to examine in more fully in GR before I try to go back through M&D
> with an eye to it.
>
> More on this soon...
>
> 4/16 of a toke over the line,
>
> Tegwar00
>
>




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