The revolutionaries of May

Dave Monroe against.the.dave at gmail.com
Tue Jul 28 07:00:51 CDT 2009


On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Rob Jackson<jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

>> Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:12:53 +0200
>> From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=E1nos_Sz=E9kely?= <miksaapja at gmail.com>
>>
>> Yes, Fanon (another hero of May 1968) was definitely an influence.
>
> Louis Menand's review of M&D (entitled 'Entropology', and the best of the
> crop) foregrounds Claude Levi-Strauss's 1955 'Tristes Tropiques' as a source
> for that novel:
>
> http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Entropology

One of the single most useful reviews (as opposed to, say, journal
articles, anthology essays, whatever) of a Pynchon novel going  ...

> And I'd say that Paolo Freire's 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' was out in
> English in just enough time to be in the mix as Pynchon was writing GR,
> alongside Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth'.

Black Skin, White Masks, however, seems an almost transparent--or at
least translucent--source for certain terms, themes, structures,
perhaps even an opening sentence for GR. Thanks again, Thomas, one of
the single most interesting observations I've ever seen here ...

> There's a definite post-colonialist sensibility in almost all of Pynchon's
> works, though he would never be formally classified as a post-colonial
> author.

Heywaitaminute--The United States is the ORIGINAL postcolony ...



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