Theme (narrative) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[alice wellintown]

Or, if the values crumble, the ground beneath her feet, shifts as
desert sands, well, at least the dear reader must be given, if not
religious solace or pholosophical asnwers, an account of the
complexity of our moral fabric. Does Wood tire of Pynchon because P's
account of our moral fabric, though it be patched together with
everyday uses and made an object by pedants who would hang it in a
museum (A. Walker), is too often a strain on the magic eye or a
tapestry we must turn over to see and, once we look underneath, at the
needlework, there is, Nothing, Nothing though we thrust thrugh the
wall as Ahabs, nothing but the eleaborate stitching of the hand of P
pointing at Nothing? But itself and its handiwork?

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 11:32 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> And, it is here that so much that Wood has to say is founded, on his
> notion of the broken estate. He can abide a Melville, even praise him
> for his mad use of metaphor, though he couches such praise in the
> crumbling certitudes stapled to a dying animal that knows naught but
> doubt, but he cannot put up with a Pynchon because literary belief
> must have values, in Booth's sense, a world of values the reader may
> stand on.
>
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 9:27 AM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> “the reader’s need to know where, in the world of values, he stands, that
>> is, to know where the author wants him to stand” (Booth. 73).
>>
>> excerpted from a brief deiscussion from Booth, on the older,
>> "discredited" meaning or application of the term.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 7:25 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Seems Paul's use of theme is the current one, according to Wikipedia ( this article could surely be expanded) and my definition is an older one.
>>>
>>> Mark, older than hip Paul....
>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(narrative)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPad