Reckoning on the Read: Misc. on pattern recogniton

[Richard Ryan]

Nice.  Adding AGP as "must read" background material.

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Just FYI: Tony Tanner said in 1971 that The Recognitions was a seriously
> neglected American novel...he knew of almost no studies, few essays of it
> then....thought it was unique and neglected enough to not have
> influenced many writers in his City Of Words----Pynchon's V. being the exception
> he wrote..
>
>
> In TT's intro to that book, he focuses on Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym as a
> prophetic novel about a pervasive theme he finds in most of the writers
> he deals with:   "The problem of whether there are significant patterns and
> signs to be detected in reality"......which obsesses so many recent American
> writers....(which is why he alludes later to The Recognitions' delving into
> that obsession early, before the sixties' writers.)
>
> I don't know this Poe work but evidently Poe writes himself into that book,
> fictionally, as
> the editor giving 'minute philological scrutiny' to Pym's heiroglyphics.......
>
> The fictional Poe gives some possible meanings to the heiroglyphics
> but the depth of the fiction, says
> Tony, is that the question whether the words were 'graven within the hills' or
> supplied
> by the [fictional[ editor, or whether nature was encoded or blank is one of
> Poe's most
> brilliant handlings, he sez.
>
> Very like our questioning discussions.
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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