Gravity’s Rainbow on every nightstand

[Robin Landseadel]

	. . .Consider this stunning sentence from William Empson’s
	Seven Types of Ambiguity: “When Tennyson retired to his study
	after breakfast to get on with the Idylls there had to be a hush in
	the house because every middle-class household would expect
	to buy his next publication.” Imagine that — a challenging work
	of poetry purchased by every middle-class household. The
	equivalent today might be a copy of Pynchon’s Gravity’s
	Rainbow on every nightstand, which is an absurd idea.
	Literature, it seems, has fallen by the wayside.

http://cornellsun.com/section/arts/content/2009/02/16/harry-potter-and-end-literacy