Foreword, when is a homeland not a homeland?

[Dave Monroe]

Well, trick is, GR was written during the Vietnam War, whilst that "Foreword" was written after 9/11 (and by a resident of NYC).  Just as those Shakesperean history plays were written after, during, and in anticipation of crises in succession to the throne.  And so forth.  Sure, you can "choose" to ignore context, to "universalize" whatever you want, but that's to ignore a helluva relevant lot about any given text et al.  Not to mention to overgeneralize meaning.  Sure, that's why interest in certain works persists, because they can be "universalized," generalized, in whatever way, to whatever extent (though, of course, interest in others might well persists because of their specificity, their peculiarity).  But that's at the expense of understanding what they might have signified in their contexts, to those who initially generated and encountered them.  Think, for example, for an example with very real social, political, historical and just plain mortal effects, what's happened with (the various books of) The Bible.  Revelations, very likely written in reference to contemporary events, but certainly with an eye towrds "universalization," being what may yet prove to be the extreme case ...

s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:I reject the 9/11 reading and choose a more general interpretation. I first read Gravity's Rainbow during the Gulf War in 1991. It blew me away watching the news accounts of the war and reading GR. I couldn't put it down. The connections were astonishing. TRP gets at the complexity of the dynamics of things like few other writers. This makes his writings
applicable to many situations. Again, this 1984 essay could have been written, as is, had 9/11 never happened. It's more universal than 9/11.

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