Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Terrance]

"The teaching and study of literature in America is done
sub specie acternitatis in an age that demands of the teacher and the
critic a
recognition of our finiteness. Our raison d'etre is not that we are
authoritative
centers elsewhere and thus judges, but decentered beings-in-the-world
whose
purpose is to explore our occasional condition. What this means is that
it is our
task as teachers and critics to undermine the very logos that has
traditionally
sanctioned our progression. Our measure should be the  'measure of our
occasion,' as the poet Robert Creeley has put it. This should make the
progression of literary studies as solitary as that of the poet. Indeed,
as
subversive."



Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Welcome aboard!  I didn't know Spanos was still going.
>  Will look this up, thanks ...
> 
> --- Jonathan Hall <jmh69 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > BTW - William Spanos deals with Moby Dick and the
> > Vietnam War and mentions GR often, and
> > overuses 'prolepsis' throughout when perhaps he
> > should have simply come out as a mystic and
> > embraced 'prophecy'.  He seems to want to draw it
> > in to bolster his argument for a poststructuralist
> > Pynchon - his rather bizarre claim being that the
> > Vietnam War was an enabling condition of
> > poststructuralist thinking. (William Spanos, The
> > Errant Art of Moby Dick: The Canon, the Cold War,
> > and the Struggle for American Studies)
> 
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