IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

There is no such thing as a traditional use of the term Romance. You
are talking nonsense. I've provided a working definition of the term
and explained it using several sources including Chase and Hawththorne
and others. Hawthorne is helpful. Try reading the Introduction to HSG
and SL.


On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>  No one has claimed an exclusively political reading. No one. This is easily
> demonstrated.  Virtually everyone seems interested in a plurality of
> readings, though some seem more inclined to satire as the central defining
> quality of the work. You seem to wish to exclude a political reading as
> "blunt hammer blows" or as beneath the interest of this great literary
> artist, or rank it low in importance. This is false to Pynchon and false to
> his ambition of building a layered inclusive vision of the world, and
> nothing is beneath his interest.. Plenty of writers exclude or ignore the
> political dimensions of the world , but Pynchon engages it directly an many
> levels, from the poetically personal to the satirically derisive.
>
> Your use of the word Romance is inept. It defies traditional use in lit cri.
> It is a bloated interpretation of the word and idiosyncratically tied to
> alice wellintown's diction.
> On Nov 5, 2009, at 2:16 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>>> After all as Keith says it's fiction and fiction needs conflict if not
>>> between  characters then between ideas.
>>
>> And there is plenty of both to go around in those P-texts. The
>> political reading is, as politics always is, an approach that can not
>> abide the plurality of readings or any other disciplne that would
>> claim a higher ground. But in a Romance, it is the imaginative reading
>> that is closest to "the truth of the human heart". The scientific
>> reading of texts and the world is satirized in P-texts. This is a
>> standard in Romance. That the political readers would dismiss an
>> imaginative reading of a Romance, of a fiction, by attacking the woman
>> and not the argument, exposes them. The ideas are poetic, are
>> fictionalized. The stuff of imagination and dream. To reduce a text to
>> its political hammer blows is a obtuse. A blunt instrument can not a
>> poem open.
>
>