How to Read Literature Like a Professor

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/17/2012 10:32 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> One of things I love about T.C. Foster is that he is not afraind to
> have opinions; this, I contend, is what often distinguishes teachers
> from publishers of academic papers who happen to teach or have to
> teach but would prefer not to. Is Foster right? No. of course not.
> P-Listers can quickly disabuse him of his misguided opinion with a
> list of quest novels that make Lot49 look like the work of a slow
> learner or an apprentice. But it is not the opinion that matters, but
> the choice of Lot49 to support the argument that matters. Give a class
> Lot49 and you will have a class engaged even if most are ready to toss
> it in the trash. And, it is the Quest, the connections, to Oedipus and
> so on that puts this book at the top of the heap as a teaching text.
> And, it is cool. Students like it once they get over their modernist
> prejudices. And, that they bring these to the class, and they still
> do, is what makes the book a wonder...yes... a quest novel to start a
> discusssion of quests in literature, and this topic, of course, is a
> grand narrative structure that, once studied, makes following the
> yellow brick road to the wonderful world of novels, and other books,
> other texts, films and so on, a skipping sin-a-long over to the
> rainbow's gravity

My excuse for liking it back then was that it was so sixties generation.

But also quite silly. Don't you have to be able to take quests a little seriously? There may be exceptions, but Lot 49 isn't one of them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/21/robert-irwin-top-10-quest-narratives


P
>
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well, he already got me on page 3, "When I teach the late-twentieth-century
>> novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of
>> the last century: Thomas Pynchon's 'Crying of Lot 49 (1965)."
>>
>> --
>> www.innergroovemusic.com