When Darwin Meets Dickens

[Otto]

Editor’s note: This is the third installment of Nick Gillespie’s 
coverage of the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting. Read part 
1, Who’s Afraid of the MLA?, here:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122705A
and part 2, The Kids Are Alright, Dammit, here:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122805B

(...)
"He led the session through a close reading of a passage from Thomas 
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The section in question was filled with 
discrepant emotions popping up even in the same short phrases. For 
instance, the female protagonist Oedipa Maas at one point hears in the 
voice of her husband "something between annoyance and agony." Palmer -- 
whose argument was incredibly complex and is hard to reproduce -- mapped 
out the ways in which both the character and the reader made sense of 
those distinct emotional states of mind. The result was a reading that, 
beyond digging deep into Pynchon, also helped make explicit the "folk 
psychology" Palmer says readers bring to texts -- and how we settle on 
meanings in the wake of unfamiliar emotional juxtapositions. As the 
panel's respondent, University of Connecticut's Elizabeth Hart, 
helpfully summarized, Palmers' reading greatly "complexified the 
passage" and was "richly descriptive" of the dynamics at play."
(...)
When Darwin Meets Dickens
By Nick Gillespie: 29 Dec 2005
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=122905B

	

	
		
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