Who reads TP? Goytisolo, yes. And Paul Ricoeur?

[Alex Colter]

Yet to meet a Grad Student at all vers'd in M&D, tho' 23 m'self....?

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:38 AM, Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would say almost certainly, though he might have picked up the metaphor
> from the "zeitgeist" around GR ... Many people know the rough sketch of the
> "plot" of GR without having read it.
>
> What's for sure is that _a lot_ of grad students have read both ricoeur
> and TRP, in re GR as well as other books, notably M&D.
>
>
>
> On Dec 13, 2011, at 11:43 PM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
>
> > More than a month back (the end of October) I saw an article in El Pais,
> a spanish newspaper, by Juan Goytisolo. In it he made mention of his summer
> reading: "... some French, some Russians, Thomas Pynchon...". Of course
> this bit of news is not that surprising, it is understandable that a
> literary figure like Goytisolo might read Pynchon. But not all cases are so
> clear.
> >    Recently I have come across one of those cases that forces the
> Pynchonian reader to choose between connectedness and coincidence. This
> occurrs in Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative vol 1, in chapter 5. Ricoeur
> draws on Georg Von Wright (Wittgenstein's collegue) to distinguish between
> causal explanation (cause and effect logic) and causal analysis.     "The
> adding of teleological explanation to causal explanation is called for by
> the logic of 'in order that'. Let us set aside the case of
> quasi-teleological explanation which is only disguised causal explanation,
> as when we say a wild animal is attracted by its prey, or that a rocket is
> drawn to its target. (!) The teleological language cannot conceal the fact
> that the validity of these explanations rests entiriely on the truth of
> their nomic connections." (p 137)
> >     The content (a critique of causal logic) along with the example of
> the rocket would be enough to  catch a GR reader's eye, but the
> Wittgenstein connection would set the paranoia machine to whirling. I
> myself took a quick look at the publication date (Editions du Seuil, 1983).
> Ricouer certainly could have used other examples to make the same point.
> >     So the question is: did Paul Ricouer read Gravity's Rainbow?
>
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