Grabar

[jbor]

on 11/9/04 4:19 AM, John M. Krafft wrote:

> Grabar wrote a
> dissertation called "Analogies between Nazi culture and American Culture"
> (2003) on Pynchon, Percy and DeLillo? Only in light of this week's  propaganda
> piece might a reader of her dissertation's abstract suspect some skepticism or
> other reservation in her use of phrases like "Pynchon promotes the thesis" and
> "Percy likewise implies." So, did she betray her life-long patriotism in
> writing her dissertation just to get past a nasty committee of America-hating
> bullies, or has she recently betrayed her scholarly self for reasons I won't
> speculate about?

http://www.techcentralstation.com/090804F.html

While her article is appalling and her comments about GR are a travesty I
don't think it's necessarily a "betrayal" or flip-flop on her part. She
mentions being "upbraided" at her dissertation defense because, I assume, in
it she hadn't agreed that "the U.S. government was a fascist regime during
the 1960s." I take it from her remarks that that had been one of the
interpretations of GR the "popular professor" promoted in the class, that it
was an interpretation of the novel she accepted as accurate (it isn't, of
course, despite Pynchon's vaudevillian parody of Richard M. "Zhlubb" driving
along the L.A. freeways in his "black Managerial Volkswagen"), but that it
is a historical assessment she dismisses as false.

One could also imagine that in her dissertation she had been hostile to what
she sees as "Pynchon's claim that, rather than being *liberators* of the
Nazi concentration camps, the U.S. was a major player in the regime's
inception." (Of course, GR shows that "the U.S." -- or interconnected
interests originating therefrom -- was in fact both these things.) I don't
find it improbable that her dissertation might have adopted an antagonistic
attitude towards what she sees as the false analogies between "Nazi culture
and American culture" which she argues are being made in the works of
Pynchon, Percy and DeLillo.

The real irony is that while she is slandering American academia as a
fascist-style conspiracy which has "deliberately set out to undermine the
tenets of Western civilization, and attempted to destroy independent thought
by systematically undercutting the idea of reason and logic", I take it that
her dissertation was ultimately accepted, she has ended up as a "college
professor" in the U.S. herself, and, thus, freedom of thought and speech and
opportunity have been seen to prevail yet again -- as they also obviously
had for her "popular professor" spouting off about U.S. governments and
society being a "fascist regime" from his tenured lectern. That brand of
extremism and propaganda is shown to be just as bankrupt as Grabar's.

best