Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[alice wellintown]

Okay, shear snuff and stuff,

Kinda like that. If good money is the truth, or the non-fiction...the
fiction is crowding it out, and, now, as we elect a president, though we
hope to re-elect one we are non too crazy about, the fiction makers are
busy coining new phrases and circulating them, my favorite one involves a
guy named Ben and his helicopter, while the good money is put away, saved
for a rainy day, and this, one might argue, debases that voice that, with
an invisible hand, squeezes the sperm.

On Saturday, September 8, 2012, Paul Mackin wrote:

>
> OK, sure.
>
> Madeleine never said you couldn't continue to put criticism of specific
> fictional works (and all such criticism is based on somebody or other's
> theory) in that Big Drawer clearly marked NONfiction.  That is, continue to
> follow conventional usage.
>
> It was probably clear to almost everybody that her argument was
> graduate-school-English-**departmentish and a prioriish.    It was plenty
> good enough as such argumentation goes.  And. of course, that a lot of
> literary people don't take this type thinking very seriously goes without
> saying.
>
> My own theory is that writing is subject to a kind of Gresham's law.  All
> writing is a mixture of fact and fiction. However, there is a definite and
> statistically verifiable tendency for fiction to drive out nonfiction. This
> is a little unfair to fiction I know. It puts it in the place of bad money,
> which as we all know from econ 101 drives out good money.   But life's not
> fair.  Anyway I will be elaborating on Gresham's Law of Writing in the
> coming weeks and will be presenting various chi square and other
> statistical tests I have applied to the data.
>
> P
>
>
> On 9/8/2012 6:41 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> So that, when one purports to link, in a realistic fashion, an abstract
>>>> thought about the nature of literature, to some specific fictional text,
>>>> that purporting--that theory--becomes *itself* a work of fiction.
>>>>
>>> No. We all know what we mean by fiction. Don't we? Usually, the term
>> "fiction" is used to describe imaginative writing in a narrative form,
>> such as the novel, the romance, the short story, though drama and
>> poetry are also forms of fiction.
>>
>> If one argues that any attempt to impose order on the flux of though
>> or experience is making a fiction, and this is a popular use of the
>> term in graduate programs these dayz, well fine, but get that out
>> there so as not to confuse others.
>>
>> Theory. Now that is a fine word. It has, as does "fiction", very
>> different meanings when used by literary folk and by scientists and by
>> those who use it in the common sense.
>>
>> But is theory fiction? No.
>>
>> If we mix and mash all of these terms and ideas into one big pile of
>> letters...well...it becomes, as Prufrock sez, or as Hamlet never quite
>> understands, impossible to say just what we mean.
>>
>> Of course, if we make clear that we are applying a defined term, say,
>> "fiction" as defined in the "poetics of fiction" or in formalism or
>> narratology or by Wayne Booth....etc. ....well we have a course 0f a
>> differenty silly bus and we can now expect Dorothy to follow our
>> yellow brick road. Or not.
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120908/590527fe/attachment.html>