Western literature in decline

[Ya Sam]

>On Oct 24, 2006, at 8:16 PM, Ya Sam wrote:
>
>>  at best, you can only hope to achieve a vague approximation, like  
>>Thomas Pynchon did with Gravity's Rainbow --his agon with Joyce-

Guys, could I ask you, in general, to quote something I quote (which might 
be also a quote) in such a way so that it will be clear that we're talking 
about a cited piece of text. Here it might seem to someone who hasn't read 
previous posts that Ya Sam wrote this. I didn't. I just posted several bits 
of an article in which Pynchon was mentioned. It's just an appeal to avoid  
misunderstandings in the future. As for my personal opinion, I believe that 
Pynchon is the contemporary "link" in the whole chain of encyclopedic 
authors such as Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Joyce etc. Mendelson said it 
much better in his article about encyclopedic narratives.

This is my original post:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0610&msg=109180&sort=date


Sorry if posted before


from "The Celluloid Canon in the Twilight of Western Literature"
By John David Ebert

"Surveying with one glance the current state of western literature--and by
literature, I mean novels, poems and plays, but also the traditional
nonfiction modalities like the literary essay and the great work of
philosophy--compared to what it looked like in, say, the first half of the
twentieth century, what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall
quality.   Reading a contemporary novel, like Salman Rushdie's The Ground
Beneath Her Feet , which falls apart about halfway through; or Umberto Eco's
The Island of the Day Before , which starts off promising, but reads more
and more like an outline for a novel; or Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty
Horses , which is so self-consciously affected that it reads like a
caricature of Faulkner; or even a master like Thomas Pynchon, whose Mason &
Dixon goes in and out of focus, one is inevitably perplexed by the
awkwardness of the performance." ...

"They are all self-conscious because the anxiety of influence has saturated
the medium so thoroughly as to make it nearly unworkable.   You cannot
improve upon Joyce, Mann, Dostoyevsky or Proust, whatever your ambitions as
a writer; at best, you can only hope to achieve a vague approximation, like
Thomas Pynchon did with Gravity's Rainbow --his agon with Joyce--or Doris
Lessing with her underrated Shikasta."

http://cinemadiscourse.com./journal/twlightLit.html

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