Bakhtin in the Tangles of Newton's Hair

[Terrance]

1. Braha, Elliot. “Menippean Form in Gravity’s Rainbow and in Other
Contemporary
American Texts.” Columbia University, 1979. (DAI 40:255A-56) 

2. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow : A Study of Its Conceptual
Structure and of
Rilke's Influence (American University Studies : Series Iv, English Lan) 
Charles Hohmann. (Out Of Print)

see also Manippean Satire and Encyclopedia 

3. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon 
Theodore D. Kharpertian / Hardcover / Published 1990
              
http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm

4. Hollander has been much discussed here. My own opinion of his work
is that it all needs to be read as one book. 

Something old
See http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/bakhtin_problems.html

Something borrowed 

Frye's Anatomy Of Criticism, Theory of Genre Encyclopedia MS & Anatomy

something new 

Fables of Subversion Satire and the American Novel
Steven C. Weisenburger

Mendelson, Edward makes the genre argument, Encyclopedia, Hollander for
MS, Weisenburger for a Postmodern satire w/o a target (non-corrective). 

What else? 

Of course this is not science, but what I like to think of as a
disciplined pluralism or an Aristotelian structure. It is  full of
contradictions if we collapse these categories of convenience. 

In the Ethics, Aristotle says that Politics is the most authoritative
and architectonic of the sciences. Sure, it gets to decide if there
will be other sciences, if they will be funded, and so on. But in the
Metaphysics, it is Wisdom, not politics that is the most archical of the
sciences. A contradiction? Not really. It's all matter of perspective,
method, principles (first and otherwise) and reality (including
fictions). 

BTW, According to The Principa of Newton, Relative or apparent motions
do not conform to the axioms or laws of motion or to the law of
gravitation. These laws, as it so happens, simply do not permit us to
distinguish empirically between rest and uniform motion in absolute
space; empirically, only absolute accelerations are determinable. And if
we cannot identify empirically a state of absolute rest, neither can we
determine empirically the absolute simultaneity of spatially separated
events, for the apparent simultaneity is relative to the motion of the
observer. Therefore, neither absolute space nor one universal time may
be identified empirically, and from an existential or Einstinian
perspective, this means they are unreal. 

Restful? MD.705


They Wake to an Unreal America
Classikal & Mechanikal
No transient realities 
No Abstract Quantities
No Consequences of Hypotheses
Only physical realities

The Alchemist with his drawing tools
A God under the sea
his compass defiles his flowing hair
And the slave boy of Socrates is free
Free to flow outside the figures Christ draws upon the ground
While high priest complain that these are only existential markings
And can not measure up to the science of Geometry

Newton with a pair of dice, 
his hair flowing from the breath of God, 
his faith unshaken, 
his reality material and true, 
exclaims, 
"the error is in the artificer and not the art of creation." 
In heaven there are no dice, but  every hair is numbered.