How to Read Literature Like a Professor

[alice wellintown]

Good point. Is Lot49 a quest narrative or a parody of the quest
narrative or detective novel or what? So, it lends itself to the genre
and classification (Formalist), tradition and individual talent
(Modernist, Eliot)...and so on...discussion. It may be more
Picaresque, or satirical, do quest narrative need to be serious or
holy? Can they be both? Is CT a quest narrative? It certainly has
several elements of the quest and frame narrative. Of, course genres
overlap and so we use the form to hem in the discussion until it
ruptures. Is the film, The Wizard of Oz a quest narrative or not? We
see that the objective of the quest, the grail,  in modern quests,
multiplies as the characters splinter and fade away, the modern quest
makes the quester the hunter and the hunted; she is running from home
as she tries to get back to it. The questions that Lot49 raise are
what keeps it on the top. And, to contradict, in part, what I said
earlier, the P-Industry's academic stuff trickles down into the
lectures and seminars.  And silly sells. And, though the 60s don't
sell as they used to, they still hold the interst of the humanties
student.

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>