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

[alice wellintown]

> Now how did that come about? Run across any doctors or medical papers that
> did the same thing? your point, a fair one, is an example of part of what is
> wrong with the Humanities industry of papers and dissertions. Do some
> reading of dissertations in other fields and you might come to see part of
> the reason that Lit. departments are in trouble.


  How did it come about? There are so many contributing factors, but
here in the US, one that's been around for a long time but has more
influence now because more students go on to college and graduate
programs, and a greater percentage are non-native speakers of the
language, is that the teaching of writing is not supported in the
grade schools, high schools, or even in most colleges and
universities. Teaching writing is labor intensive, some would say
drudgery. In most programs this job is given to the folks at the
bottom of the ladder, where the first few steps are a treadmill that
spins people in and out of the position (adjuncts and the like). Given
the choice, to teach Pynchon or Shakespeare or Literature of any kind,
or to teach writing, basic writing, composition, most will choose the
former.

  This past year I read 90 research papers in Biology and Chemistry.
In teaching the research and writing process, I read hundreds of peer
reviewed academic journals. I read these anyway because, I love
Physics and Environmental Science and I'm quite keen on Physics these
days, but what you say was not confimrmed by what I read. So many of
the bleeding edge papers are written by L2 or L3 scholars who are not
supported with translation, editing and the like. So the jargon and
the jumble of grammar is not a disease of the Humanties, but is spread
in all disiplnes.

But this is the negative side of wha are, very interesting times in
the world of published papers. We have now more and better
translations, more and more cross-cultural and cross-linguistis
schoalrship than ever. It's quite an amazing exchange of ideas that is
taking place, and that English is the language, not the one we would
choose, makes this exchange quite difficult but, nonetheless,
miraclulous.





>
> As for Cervantes and words involving techne:
>  http://www.uaemex.mx/plin/colmena/Colmena_73/Aguijon/La_palabra_maquina_Quijote.pdf
> Of course if you don't know Spanish it won't help much. So let me
> add: http://www.traduccionliteraria.org/1611/art/canivell.htm
>
> ciao
> mc
> Glad to see you're getting round to The RTP, let us know what ya think.
> Could the that Frank be important for the AtD Frank?
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Monday, July 22, 2013 2:31 AM
> Subject: Re: Mo Mo Mo P Scholarship (this Dis is on Film)
>
> 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
>>
>>
>