Very misc. touching on Pynchon and counterforces

[alice wellintown]

The Slow Learner Introduction, and a few of the other essays, the
Luddite essay, the Orwell essay....provide good information from the
author about his development of voice and his attitude toward it. The
idea, voice, predates the modern novel and can be traced back to Homer
at least, but a very good historical account of the debate, the
culture and counterculture, is provided by the Chicago guys, who like
Aristotle, their model of laying out the history of ideas, define its
kinds and degrees and provide examples. Wayne Booth's _The Rhetoric of
Fiction_ is the most important of these, but there are several others
we might be interested in. My own interest in literature/philosophy
comes through this tradition of Dewey and McKeon, this "school"
includes not only the great Richard McKeon and his wife Zahava, but
formalists like Percy Lubbuck. In any event, Pynchon does come of age
in the middle of this debate about the rhetoric of fiction, including
the idea that showing is somehow better than telling, an idea Booth
launches his book from with examples from Fielding and by questioning
the Turn after Flaubert, but now we're getting into that hated critic
of Pynchon, James Wood so...but the idea that voice and point of view,
even second person point of view (Michel Butor), are as simple as
first, second, third, and authorial commnetary, showing not telling
and so on, is shown to lack sophistication and depth and that to plumb
the subject with neo-Aristotelian classification analysis quite
fruitful.