P defends V

[Joseph Tracy]

On Aug 30, 2010, at 8:23 AM, alice wellintown wrote:


> you could read hawthorne's prefaces, i posted them--he defines the
> ameican romance in each preface--the one to hsg is the best.
>
I don't think I was around then, but I will try to do a search.  I  
taught 11th grade American Lit for a couple years. but I am really  
fundamentally a visual artist who  likes to read. If you have the  
piece by Wilson available I would genuinely be interested. I still  
think your use of the term is too personal to be a common and useful  
term of reference. Maybe everyone else gets it  and maybe some polite  
and better informed student of literature from this list would be so  
kind as to give me a working definition that will make sense of what  
you are saying.   This is not the first time I have broached this  
subject. I will be happy to apologize if I have been way off or even  
significantly  off the mark.  There are more than a few gaps in my  
education.

> you could
> read that list from twain i posted. you could read chase.
>
chase? help please?

> i posted and
> monroe posted from chase. you could read the stuff i posted from on
> native ground or from edmunnd wilson, on romance. you could read the
> book on teaching pynchon, wherein the author discusses chase. you
> could take a course in american literatre, might help you understand
> pynchon. but you prefer not to.
>
I minored in English and took an American Lit class. I do not claim a  
high level of expertise. However nothing you have said makes me feel  
that you have the kind of definitive expertise you claim concerning  
Pynchon or American Lit. I have friends who teach college level Lit  
and writing and they are more humble and willing to explain  
themselves than you are.  The academic diversity of opinions and  
critical approaches to Pynchon demonstrates to my satisfaction that  
you are far from rigorous or persuasive in many of your arguments or  
methods. You present yourself  as having a higher level of literary  
background but rather than demonstrating that or publishing well  
composed papers you mostly talk about literary influences: Melville,  
Hawthorne, Adams, postmodern  theory; you then act as though that  
should explain everything and only the ignorant will fail to  
understand how profoundly this explains what Pynchon is doing.  When  
someone challenges this rather scattershot approach you respond by  
appealing to your presumed superior authority rather than by cogent  
reasoning and examples from the text or from other critical writing.

I do not expect people of lively minds and diverse world views and  
experience to come to agreement about a work of art. I do  expect  
that many minds attracted by the power of  a n important body of  
work  will bring forth areas of  agreement, disagreement, personal  
insight, historical context,  political and philosophical context,  
human psychology, literary context and many other resources  to   
bring a work into a greater clarity and fulness than I might find on  
my own.  This process is hugely intriguing to me as an artist, as a  
critical thinker, and as  human being interested in the inner  
workings of a communitarian project.


> you could read bartleby. btw, my hands
> and my mind are like bartelby's eyes. my eyes too, soon will be
> miltonic, but i doubt its just from reading...my dad has bad eyes too,
> but then, he reads as much as me...so only He who walks the waves
> knows and since i'm lonely, i'm goin out there now to try to catch a
> few lefts.
>
> seeya
>
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 10:22 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>  
> wrote:
>
>> It is as far as I can tell a rather lonely we, a kind of a solo  
>> we.  I have
>> never heard any critic use the term romance in the way alice does  
>> and I have
>> no idea what he is talking about.  I think it is so unusual a  
>> usage as to
>> constitute a kind of private language.
>> It is certainly not illuminating to me. What do you mean by  
>> calling a novel
>> a romance?
>>
>>  In a way, the competing interpretations  of Pynchon are like
>> interpretations of the Bible.  I think this may actually be  
>> deliberate on
>> Pynchon's part. Can any author invoke a world so large  without  
>> creating
>> true believers and heretics, sects and break away sects?  And  
>> isn't  the
>> creator the biggest heretic of all, who must flout every rule that  
>> is made
>> or bore the created  world and its visitors to death?
>>
>> On Aug 29, 2010, at 4:18 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Aug 29, 2010, at 1:16 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> . . . we, once again, fail to see what Robin sees between the
>>>> lines.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Is that the Royal "We"?
>>>
>>
>>
>>