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

[alice wellintown]

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/julyaugust/feature/swimming-through-libraries



On 7/21/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>