IVIV Hope Harlingen: ( spoilers)

[alice wellintown]

Tore Rye Andersen wrote:
>
> alice:
>
>> In Fables of Subversion, Steven Weisenburger discusses Heller,
>> Pynchon, Coover, John Hawkes and William Gaddis—as authors of
>> “degenerative satire,” which is a postmodern satire; its comedy and
>> humor are beyond the kind of corrective laughter typical of
>> traditional literary satire and “subvert hierarchies of values and
>> reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its
>> own.”
>
> Much as I admire his GR Companion, I really don't find Fables of
> Subversion very convincing. Probably what happens when you try to
> lump someone like Pynchon together with misanthropes like Gaddis
> and Hawkes.

It' an ambitious book. His project is to define the new satires and
instruct tradtional readers so that they can get more out of the
texts, dig the humor, the comedy, and then accept it as worthy of
serious study. Not unlike Pynchon's project actually. And, like
McHale, and he cites McHale, while the ideas are a bit dated now and
sometimes more specualtive than they would be if he were to revise it
and re-issue it (sort of like what McHale did after his Postmodernist
Fiction with Constructing Postmodernism--where his Zapping essay on VL
is located), they are very important to those readers who might argue
with James Wood & Co. about the value of these new satires and or
Romantic Subversive Satires. I love how he writes. Clear and concise,
even down to earth at times, even when writing about and with
Postmodern jargon and even as he wrestles with the Frye factor and so
many other entrenched schools. What's cool about his reading of
Pynchon is that he's done all the research. I mean, he wrote that A
Gravity's Rainbow Companion, and in this work he makes use of it. He
has guts too. And, I like that. To frame an argument with the Pudding
scene is no easy task even if you've done all the research because he
needs to keep the reader fully focused on his thesis even as the
disgusting scene is described and alayzed.


>
> Considering you're a lady, it surprises me that you don't quote
> your fellow sisters more often. Try reading Molly Hite, Kathryn
> Hume and Katherine Hayles - some of Pynchon's best critics, IMHO,
> who all have a good eye for the tenderness and sentimental streak
> which tempers Pynchon's cynicism. So have Tony Tanner, Thomas Schaub
> and Edward Mendelson, for that matter - really any Pynchon critic
> worth his or her salt.

Read all of these authors. And a boatload of others. Love them all.

I love Pynchon criticism, sometimes more than the novels. I'm not a
big fan of reviews. First reads are not worth publishing. Needed tp
promote the works and so on, but rarely worth my time.