Question re IV: from epic to everyday

[Mark Kohut]

SYNCHRONICITY, Mr. Jung...RIGHT HERE, JUST MOMENTS AGO
 
I have been asking myself that EXACT question about TRP 'cause I'm reading Tillyard's The Elizabethan World View in my Shakespeare self-education
and that concept pervades that book......
 
And I did read Lovejoy back in the [college] day.....so, time for a redux?
 
AND I just got on the computer to FIND a copy of Lovejoy....but stopped here first
 
and, whether TRP did read it or not, the playing with the concept of the great chain seems to be there...that is, from heavens to earth and back again...
 
Tillyard is an older critic who shows how such ideas got used in S......and the book I cite
'refutes' what Tillyard said was a strong opinion goin' round that S. wrote in a rare period
of secularism between Catholicism and Protestantism pervading.
 
 
 

From: Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.net>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>; János Székely <miksaapja at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: Question re IV: from epic to everyday


I've wondered from time to time if Pynchon ever read Lovejoy's "The Great Chain of Being" 

It would be interesting to have a peek in his library.

Lawrence



On Aug 31, 2011, at 8:33 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

The best modern NEW Shakespeare annotations [Arden editions] are wonderful (if one has the time
>and inclination) for simply suggesting by quoted associations how a notion in Plutarch might
>be buried in a Shakespeare couplet.....how even a phrase from Plutarch,  or Montaigne--or contemporaries
>or ANYONE he is likely to have read might be reflected in Shakespeare's lines.........
> 
>this is of a different order than annotating a story from Ovid that S. clearly uses (and invariably) changes for his genius use.
> 
>In that spirit---that is loose annotation--- I want to offer the theme of Life Against Death--which we are almost
>sure P read--see famous essay on----as (part of what) is contained in the line
>about sexual desire from the epic to the everyday......................................
> 
>leading to, in Brown, what happens when it is thwarted as it always has been in History....
> 
>
>
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