"Bouncy Little Tunes"

[monroe at mpm.edu]

>From Nadine Attewell, "'Bouncy Little Tunes': Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and
Narrative in Gravity's Rainbow," Contemporary Literature, Vol. 45, No. 1
(Spring 2004), pp. 22-48 ...

"... my reading of the nostalgias ... Gravity's Rainbow articulates for past
historical moments, for past modes of seeing, constructing, and being in the
world, prompts a difficult set of questions about pleasure, power, and the
practice of reading.  More specifically, my reading of Gravity's Rainbow
suggests the need to lay aside the critical duality of affirmation/critique
and instead evolve a language for talking about the complex ramifications of
complicity.  Gravity's Rainbow urges that rather than persist in aligning
various terms ('nostalgia,' 'irony') with one or the other side of an
endless string of binaries (affirmation/critique, subversion/collaboration)
that may be reduced, ultimately, to the banality of good/bad, we try to work
through the muddle the novel names 'double aagency,' to recognize
affirmation's critiques and critique's affirmations.

"We might begin by tracking down alternative frameworks for understanding
nostalgia.  I can't prove that Thomas Pynchon read Herbert Marcuse's Eros
and Civilization (1966) while writing his World War II novel, but like the
writings of Norman O. Brown, Eros provides a revisionist account of
repression and whistory whose reelvance to Gravity's Rainbow is difficult to
deny...."

http://www.jstor.org/journals/00107484.html

See ...

Marcuse, Herbert.  Eros and Civilization:
   A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.  2nd ed.
   Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 (1955).

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/

Recalling, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48844

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48845

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48847

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48850

Thanks again, Prof. Krafft.  But that Denver Quarterly isn't in yet ...