Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

[alice wellintown]

and hear. Read with your ears boyz and galz. Read wit duh EEYAH!


On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 9:05 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> Now, mixing in the mix here, that chapter in AGTD that begins in the hard
> cover on p 418, with the crew and that Invisible Trespass of narrative that
> did not define, the passage of the day, where Pynchon writes like a manic
> Hamlet, punning away on to the thin ice of the day ay ay ay ay...dare I say
> Shakespeare, so soon or later, and with P it was quite young that he
> started, ambitiously and foolishly playing with Shakespeare's Magic,
> Shakespeare pressing in on the aging ceiling wax, as with Melville's
> greatest speeches and narrative digressions, when Ahab, for example, morphs
> into Lear and Milton's Satan, a captain of Capitalism on the iron rails of
> Robber Barron Business and forges the chains that Marley holds up to
> Scrooge, the chains of the Cross, the gallows...so too our Mighty P now, an
> old man with drying voice, has Eliot buries where the Dogs dig, and turns
> to Shakesepeare, but turn us back now to the New York Warf and Woof, there,
> p397, is New York's central park, a Strret Arab with a stiff hat and
> tattoos. Notice that EAR! The lad has tongue that puts in fricatives at the
> end of the swah so common to the Gilander like P, so listen to his sonding
> like Art Carney, but here, his boy is a live, and contrasted with the
> stilted phoney theater boyz in balloon & Co.
>
> So we here NYC here. Don't we? And what NYC do we here?
>
>
> On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 8:51 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The idea of a "Great American Novel" or "the Great American Novel" is
>> useful, even if it serves an argument that no such novel exists or has ever
>> existed or can ever exist, that is, a Platonic Ideal or,
>> anti-Platonic...anti-Cannonical...etc...argument. To dispense with it is to
>> acknowledge that it needs dispensing with and this might follow the common
>> approach of tracing its origins to an essay by De Forest, and then
>> examining how the Americans, writing in a language that was around long
>> before they were, one that is named after their Mother oppressor, and so
>> on...so American novel and the Spirit of forming a novel, American voice
>> and theme and character and plot and so on, distinct from and equal to, if
>> not, as with all other things, greater than the fading Empire's
>> productions, past present and future. The novel that holds in its womb and
>> loins the Zeitgeist, as surely GG does more than any other great work
>> of the period, is yet another way of defining the phrase, and on this and
>> on many other counts, one can certainly argue convincingly, given academic
>> generosity, that Fitzgerald's little book is a Great American Novel or,
>> novella, at least.
>>
>> It has been argued that GR or M&D are Great American novels, but I would
>> have to go with AGTD, were I too argue that P has written one. Though V.
>> and GR are, in many respects, more like Moby-Dick, and Confidence Man, two
>> candidates for the accolade, AGTD has Twain in the mix, and all manner of
>> other things that make it a far better Graet American Novel than GR or M&D.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 1:56 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I thought it was How to Make Love like a Porn Star
>>>
>>>
>>> >>
>>> >> >
>>> >> >
>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/01/is-great-gatsby-great-american-novel
>>> >>
>>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#Reception
>>> >>
>>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>
>>
>
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