AGTD & Genre as History

[alice wellintown]

Yes, McHale's essay is the best in the collection; a review is
provided below. David S Reynolds has done much work on this kind of
reading of the Jacksonian Age, and of Melville, and of Lippard's _The
Quaker City_, so see, again, Beneath the American Renaissance_, his
Introduction to Lippard's Monks of Monks Hall or Quaker City, and
American in the Age of Jackson. And, as mentioned several times as
well, Bryant's Melville & Repose.



Brian McHale’s essay, ‘Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching’, is
particularly persuasive and insightful, asserting that ‘Against the
Day is a library of entertainment fiction … passed through the looking
glass, rendered differently, altered: parodied, revised and
demystified, queered’ (24). McHale specifically argues how the Tom
Swift-inspired adventure, enduring Western, and spy thriller genres
are represented in Pynchon’s novel through the practice of ‘mediated
historiography’, which he defines as ‘the writing of an era’s history
through the medium of its popular genres’ (25). Amy J. Elias builds on
McHale’s fantastic opening critique by logically analysing how
Pynchon’s defiance of generic expectations accommodates his anarchic
politics.

Book reviews: Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide
edited by Jeffrey Severs and
Christopher Leise. Scott Macleod.
Transnational Literature Vol. 5 no. 1, November 2012.
http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/bitstream/2328/26462/1/Pynchon.pdf