IV and cultural assimilation

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 2:15 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> In any event, P is commenting on the current state of affairs more
> than the history that his readers are not likely to recall or remember
> with any degree of certainty or faith. That he historisizes should not
> cause readers to project a wiki-novel world from the fragments he has
> deliberately left ...unmelted and fractured. P's texts are a
> fragmanted and cracked looking glass held up to Nature and not a
> looking glass held up to California circa 1970.

Despite no doubt being the prime target here, I've explicitly long
agreed here with this nonetheless, with teh caveat that, while
Pynchon's novels--wile most anyone's--are first and foremost of course
of their own times, whether they know it or not (cf. that jamesonian
political unconscious), and hence what I've characterized herebefore
[sic, but I like this slip, so ...] as my New Historicist approach
even to "contemporary" (postwar?) literature, it's still well worth,
as Hollander, Weienberger, et al., have shown, looking up the
references (at very least ...) ...

Meanwhile, think, perhaps, stained glass (and cf. overal Cleanth
Brooks' well-wrought urn), not in the least in both its prismatic
properties and its allegorical functions ...