Pynchon and Nabokov at the Gaddis-list

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence Wharton" <lwharton at uab.edu>
To: <gaddis-l at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 11:50 PM
Subject: Re: eGad: Re: McElroy/Hannah/Gaddis and workshopping


> At 12:35 PM 6/9/03 -0400, you wrote:
>
> FWIW:  Earl Ganz told me that he and Pynchon were graders for Nabakov.
> And, as I remember, he also told me they both had stories in the same
issue
> of New World Writing.
>
> Larry W
>
>
>
> >  What about all the writers who might not
> >> sound as if they were the "product" of a creating writing workshop who
> >> actually *were*, both as teachers and as students, like John Hawkes
(who
> >> took an MFA from Iowa with Flannery O'Connor and then taught at Brown),
> >> Coover, who taught at Iowa, Elkin (who would go on to teach workshops,
but
> >> who didn't take them because he didn't know about "them" (Stanford and
Iowa
> >> at the time), John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon, who took workshops at
Cornell
> >> from Nabokov?
> >
> >????  I thought that Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's
> >lectures on literature, not a writing course.  Did Nabokov
> >read any of his students' work but exams written
> >in response to his questions?  That's what VN's lectures
> >on literature describe.
> >
> >Here's what google turns up:
> >
> >www.vheissu.be/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm
> >from Pynchon Notes 26-27, spring-fall 1990, pp. 5-59
> >
> >While it has become axiomatic among some scholars to say Nabokov
> >was Pynchon's comparative literature, checking a bootlegged copy of
> >Pynchon's transcript (albeit one that may have been tampered with)
> >against the course listings for the years in question yields no evidence
> >Pynchon ever enrolled in any of Nabokov's courses for credit.
> >Pynchon enrolled in neither Literature 311-312, "Masters of European
> Fiction," nor Literature 325-326, "Russian Literature in Translation."
> >Of course, Pynchon might have audited Nabokov, off the record.
> > Indeed, a member of Pynchon's undergraduate cohort, Robert H. Eisenman
> (B. A. Cornell, 1958), now Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at
> Cal State Long Beach, said in a recent telephone interview: "Everybody who
> was anybody audited the legendary Nabokov lectures, to hear the showman on
> Emma, Anna, and Gregor Samsa.
> > It was a very large lecture hall with no attendance monitors, so
auditors
> caught individual lectures as they pleased. Pynchon would have known
that."
> >
> > -Lukas Wagner
> > wagner at pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu
> >