summing up

[Vincent A. Maeder]

From: Otto
		>>"Paul Mackin" wrote I'm still interested in those
Pynchon & Pale Fire essays. If they're on line you can google them.<
>Unfortunately they're not, so if anybody has got any of those essays
and
could send it ...<

Ask and you shall receive (sorry for the cut-n-paste, I just didn't want
to retype them all...)  V.

Nabokov's Influences on Pynchon as exemplified by a reading of PAle
Fire: NIPPAF
or NPPF

We already have one possibility:  Waxwing (trivial to be sure, but what
greater treasures lurk?)  And what an opportunity to open the mind of
the greatest writer by reviewing an influences work?  Here are some more
connections/criticism/research to be explored if we were to go this
route.  

A possible springboard for discussion(1):
Mesher, David R.: "Pynchon and Nabokov's V.". Pynchon Notes, 8, 1982,
pp. 43-46

For those with desires to explore the religious aspect(1): Noble, John
Partridge. Postmodernist Fiction: Theological Language and Moral Vision
in Borges, Nabokov, and Pynchon. University of Virginia, Ph.D. 1992.

And the philosophical aspect(1):
Strehle, Susan. "Actualism: Pynchon's Debt to Nabokov." Contemporary
Literature (Madison, WI), Spring 1983, 24:1, pp. 30-50.

Other critique as a benchmark(1):
Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. "The V-Shaped Paradigm: Nabokov and Pynchon."
Cycnos, v. 12, no. 2, 1995, pp. 173-180. [Discusses The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight and V.]

Would you like some rabbit with that?(2)
Clark, Beverly Lyon: Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror Worlds of
Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang, 1986 

Then there is the fascinating Cervantes-Nabokov-Pynchon connection(3):
Holdsworth, Carole, "Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon", Cervantes:
Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 8.1 (1988): 47-53 

And the whole issue of Pale Fire criticism and its connection to
Pynchon(4):
Gibson, Jennifer Ann. Artificial Perplexities: The Paradigm of Gothic
Fiction and Its Postmodern Survival in the Wok of Nabokov, Pynchon, and
Beckett. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Ph.D., 1991.

Don't forget that Gnod's Statistics places Nabokov closest to
Pynchon(5).

The connection with Lolita and COL49(6), and GR(7).

There's that Williams College course, ENG361 Nabokov and Pynchon(8).
"After a brief comparative study of their short stories, the course will
focus on selected novels by each author. Texts include: Pnin, Lolita,
and Pale Fire by Nabokov; and, by Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, and
Gravity's Rainbow (to which a substantial portion of the latter part of
the course will be devoted)" as taught by Professor Stephen Fix(9).

And how about "the uses of experiments in narration for discriminating
private and public craziness" as taught by Professor John Limon(10) in
ENGL 357(11) Contemporary American Fiction comparing Pale Fire and The
Crying of Lot 49, among others.  (Also at Williams College, though I
have no connection to this place). 

V.

(1)     http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/bibf2.htm

(2)     http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/bibf.htm

(3)     http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~cervantes/csa/artics88/holdswor.htm

(4)     http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/bibpf.htm

(5)     http://www.globalnetworkofdreams.com/books/related/pynchon.php

(6)     http://www.fulmerford.com/waxwing/nabobilia/nv18.html

(7)     http://www.fulmerford.com/waxwing/nabobilia/nabobilia.html

(8)
http://www.williams.edu/admin-depts/registrar/catalog/depts/engl/engl361
.html

(9)     http://www.williams.edu/English/faculty/FIX.HTM

(10)  http://www.williams.edu/English/faculty/LIMON.HTM

(11)
http://www.williams.edu/admin-depts/registrar/catalog/depts/engl/engl357
.html