Wood's "common reader"

[David Morris]

http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh14content/Walser.pdf

"I take McElroy’s greatness as a given. And yet—to be honest—he does not
make survival easy on himself.Yes, he displays in all of his
work a command of the “highly specialized discourses” (Siemion 134) that
make up the unprecedentedly powerful system of contemporary science. Many
of his contemporaries, by comparison, are dealing only in simplified
sketches and textbook condensations. But this command is not necessarily an
advantageous trait, when it comes to literary selection. For most readers,
the problem is not mastery, but how in the absence
of that mastery to make enough sense of the world—and McElroy may simply be
too brilliant and conscientious to construct a model of the whole that is
encompassable by minds less formidable than his own. "
 "Common Reader" is the enemy of literature.  Seriously, is GR written for
the common reader?

On Sunday, October 21, 2012, David Morris wrote:

>  How does Woods feel about Joeseph McElroy.  Years ago I read his "An
>> Actress in the Houe" and thought it a rare and accomplished modernist work:
>> almost stream of consciousness first person observations. Very rare for a
>> book written in 2004.
>
>
> Any thoughts about McElroy's earlier works?
>
> David Morris
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20121021/65386ea4/attachment.html>