Reading the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow ...

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Dave Monroe<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From Molly Hite, "Reading the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow with
> Marcuse, Freud, and the Yippies," Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The
> Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works , ed. Thomas H, Schaub (NY: MLA,
> 2008), pp. 39-45:
>
>   "One reason the theorists most likely to be read in academic
> literary graduate programs of the 1980s and 1990s fall short of
> illuminating much of the value system of Gravity's Rainbow is that
> they are not the writers that United Sates academics--and, more
> important, activists--were reading in the late 1960s, the period
> during which Pynchon was writing the novel...." (p. 39)
>
> "The subversive play by all sots of 1960s radicals was often rotted in
> the sociological theorizing of Herbert Mrcuse ....  His enormously
> influential 1955 cultural synthesis, Eros and Civilization: A
> Philosophical Inqury into Freud (resiisued with an important political
> preface in 1966), provides a framwork for exactly those elements of
> the novel that have proved most pressing and elusive...." (p. 40)
>
> http://www.mla.org/store/CID23/PID336
>
> I'm not one to say I told you so, but ...
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48841
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48845
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48844
>
> ... but don't take my word for it ....
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0401&msg=87914
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0508&msg=97249
>
> And see as well, e.g., ....
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0310&msg=86434
>
> ... but I DID tell y'all so, so ...

"... preparation sometimes included reading Herbert Marcuse and
Chairman Mao and the comprehension issues that came along with that
..." (IV, Ch. 17, p. 301)