Mo Mo Mo P Scholarship (this Dis is on Film)

[alice wellintown]

Someone in the P-Industry is keeping track, if not perusing these
dissertations. I've read lotz and I think many are not worth the time
it takes to figure out what the author is trying to convey. Jargon and
have digested regurgitation...blah blah, but I like this one. I like
it  a lot, actually.


The unfortunate hyperbole in the passage quoted may be owed to
inexperience, the audacity of ignorance, of youthful arrogance, or to
what has become a tradition, a habit in the academy. I suspect the
last. Take it out and you have a better paper. The author never
defends this claim. In fact, a lot of claims are not well supported,
some are better addressed by the works cited, some are simply driven
into the fog of abstractions and theory. What I like is the discussion
of MASH and  GR. And the stuff on Joyce. Nice!

Again, I don't think the Dis argues that there is a correct approach,
although it does take advantage of "mis-readings" (e.g.,
Weisenburger), or "what is missed" by other approaches. This is,
again, a stupid academic habit that this Dis doesn't surrender to
often.


I don't recall a technical discussion of windmills in DQ. But another
example will make your point: Moby-Dick. Melville does not expect the
reader to know the technology of saling or whaling. Indeed, his
narrator, and his readers are overwhelmed by the complexity of both
and this is the point. It is, as the Dis here implies by citing
Bakhtin, and by discussing this idea, an essential element of the
Romance/Anatomy M-satire. Or, the Physics in AGTD. The Dis advocates
cloe reading to discover themes and tecniques, but at the same time,
calls attention to the self-conscious auteur who, in his encyclopedic
details, admits that he is lifting, mapping intertextually, and is
only an expert at fiction making, not at explaining the brow of the
sperm whale or entropy. This modern narrative strategy, though in use
by Melville, is lost on some readers of P, who assume he is not, like
his questers, also only searching the book(s), wondering  and
wandering  in the wonderful land of the library.






On 7/21/13, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
> Doesn't that imply that there is a correct way to read it? Don Quixote uses
> special terms related to the technology of windmills, if you don't know this
> will you be unable to "know" the book? What happens when centuries and
> technological changes separate readers from the context of the writing? Are
> we the clerics of the bon mot that will illuminate the uniniciated? Couldn't
> one have a fruitful reading experience without these oh so important
> connections?
>
> Jes sayin'.
> ciao
> mc
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Friday, July 19, 2013 7:47 PM
> Subject: Mo Mo Mo P Scholarship (this Dis is on Film)
>
> If you don’t know movies you will never know Gravity’s Rainbow and you
> will find no soft landing nor parachuted phallus banana into The Zone
> (The Oz) of the novel’s “paracinematic” (388), oneiric narrative. His
> referential obsession with cinema—sometimes direct, sometimes obtuse,
> sometimes anachronistic, sometimes fictitious—speaks not only to the
> dilemmatic theme of interpreting and reconciling appearance versus
> reality, fact versus fiction, in the context of war, but to the
> difficulty in literarily categorizing his novel’s style and its place
> in twentieth century literature. Therefore, as a means of actively
> alternating from literary history and its exhausted categorical
> rubrics of modernism and postmodernism when working with Gravity’s
> Rainbow, I suggest that the novel is better mapped onto a film
> historical timeline as a means of best understanding its literary
> design.31
>
> https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/33115/research.pdf?sequence=2
>
>