Very misc. touching on Pynchon and counterforces

[alice wellintown]

And, as I am reminded that Richard McKeon, again, in the footsteps of
Aristotle, describes the balance act of oligarchy and
democracy/anarchy, the fulcrum of equality & inequality and absolute
claims to the fulcrum, and, as Ben Franklin also held, in democracy,
inequlity causes revolution, and revolutions are of two kinds, those
that change the idea of equlity in the constitution and those that
change party without changing the form of government, we might
consider if the recent shift in greater inequality or toward oligarchy
is a revolution and, if so, be it the Reagan/Gingrich revolution or
however we name it, does it mean the end of American democracy, and if
it does, does this confirm Aristotle's argument that government
structured merely and wholly on equality can not last. And, since
freedom is the basis of equality in democractic state, two problems,
the fredom that allows for inequality of wealth and the freedom of
chaos and anarchy,

On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 7:56 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.