Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

One of the reasons I find the California works of Pynchon so beside
the point is that he doesn't, despite the clever readings of these
texts that argue otherwise, tackle mighty oceans or, as Nabokov sez,
send planets spinning. One could argue that VL is more major than
minor or that CL49 is a far more important work than IV or VL because
of its cannonical power, although it is not as unique as the academy
has rendered it. Where are the planets that spin outside of Oedipa's
projections? Not in the prose. Not in the J-Tragedy parodies or pop
culture tropes and humor. When does Pynchon create a world? Send the
planets a spin?  This is what major authors do. But in his minor
works, P writes like a minor author. He works with his standard set
piece formulas  and mixes things up just enough, sprinkles on a bit of
angel dust and makes minor magic. His major works, from V. to AGTD owe
a huge debt to Melville and Hawthorne and America's dark romantics. In
fact, V., GR, and M&D are so indebted to Melville one wonders why P
has not written more about Melville. We await the Introduction to a
Melville text from P. Bartleby, perhaps?

In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, Mariners,
Renegades and Castaways, C.L.R. James anticipated many of the concerns
and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and
Postcolonial Studies. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James
challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a
"totalitarian" Ahab and a "democratic, American" Ishmael, he offered
instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose "captain of industry"
leads the "mariners, renegades and castaways" of its crew to their
doom.

http://www.upne.com/1-58465-093-1.html






On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:10 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Morris wrote:
>>
>> Knowing nothing about this Mark Lawson, I'd only say that Pynchon
>> might not really be in the category of "post-WWII American literary
>> giants."  I would think the term would apply to authors coming to
>> prominence in the close-term aftermath of that event, and thus their
>> identities having been intimately formed by that event.  I would think
>> that any post-modern author would not be in their ranks.  Maybe
>> Vietnam era (and post) American literary giants would be more
>> accurate.
>>
>> David Morris
>
> Post Cold War perhaps.
> From "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
> "It [science fiction]was just as important as the Beat movement going on at
> the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with
> only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the
> cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the
> Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal
> refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.
>
> By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was
> the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended
> to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and
> the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy
> to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and
> before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply
> out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited
> range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to
> seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those who,
> particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies --
> conventional wisdom."
>