subculture pages

[Al X]

Yeah...believe I can help you here. According to the world-renowned San 
Narciso Pynchon site,

In 1959, Pynchon applied for a Ford Foundation fellowship; his application 
included an autobiographical sketch in which he reportedly details his 
literary development:


"[H]e divides his writing life into five principal phases:

an initial period of romanticized war-stories;
a second of athesim/logical positivism that led to a rash of science 
fictions;
a third (and romantic) phase that brought imitations of Thomas Wolfe, F. 
Scott Fitzgerald, and Lord Byron;
then two years in the Navy and a swing back to
a classicism that (he says) brought imitations of Henry James, Nelson 
Algren, and William Faulkner;
then a fifth, back at Cornell for his junior and senior years, when he 
dabbled at but became fully disaffected with the Byronic romanticism of the 
Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg), thus to begin a set of Voltairean, "Candide-like" 
stories, a foretaste of the satires written in his maturity.
This brought him safely up to the present, to 1959, where he saw himself 
''entrenched on the T.S. Eliot side of no man's land'" ( from "Thomas 
Pynchon at Twenty-Two: A recovered Autobiographical Sketch" by Steven 
Weisenburger; American Literature, Volume 62, Number 4)


The same autobiographical sketch reportedly describes what he perceived as a 
constant fluctuation between Classicism and Romanticism within his writing 
style, structure, and subject matter.

Ironic? Pynchon said (and the italics are ours), "the Cornell seminars 
taught him the way of crafting a fiction around one central metaphor that 
unifies its sometimes very disparate and complex elements of character, 
imagery, and action."

Go crazy,
Boggle_King


>From: "Otto" <o.sell at telda.net>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: subculture pages
>Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 08:14:32 +0200
>
>Fringeware subculture pages:
>http://www.fringeware.com/subcult/Thomas_Pynchon.html
>
>Bonesy Jones writes:
>
>"Writes his first short story around this time: "it was set during WWII, in
>the South Pacific, and centered on a theme of anti-idealism." Pynchon 
>claims
>that his writing at this time is of three periods: "romanticized
>war-stories", "atheism/logical positivism that led to a rash of science
>fictions", and "imitations of Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lord
>Byron."
>
>but he gives no source for his quotes.
>Can someone help me out?
>
>Otto
>
>
>

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