Homegrown Homeland & the Felling-stones

[Terrance]

> 
> In addition to the contextual argument offered by jbor, what takes it beyond
> 9/11 for me is that he uses the phrase 'bombs falling.' While the word
> 'homeland' is a buzzword for current U.S. events, no one remembers 9/11 as
> the day bombs fell on American soil. For me, 'homeland' triggered the 9/11
> association and 'bombs falling' took me to the World Wars and even to Iraq.
> I didn't stay in New York when I came to the words 'bombs falling.' Planes
> crashing into buildings was such a unique, outrageous and defining event.
> Pynchon's use of 'bombs falling' points elsewhere for me.

That's another reason I can't make the connection others are making. 




With this stunning debut as a critic, Empson legitimized ambiguity as a
positive quality of literary texts without giving up authorial
intention, and this achievement made him a powerful force in modern
theory. Critics quickly protested, however, that his focus on short
texts slighted the complete work; that he ignored the relations among
poetry, history, and ideology; that the human needs satisfied by poetry
were lost in intricate formalist explication; that his approach valued
ambiguity too highly as a measure of merit; and that he detected
ambiguities too easily.

AND

Why Pynchon's Foreword is not a Biology text. 

One way is to define 'literature' as everything in print.


http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/271wellek.html