what is an author? & P-Bio Stuff & The Company We Keep (An Ethics of Fiction)

[alice malice]

Read the Wiki article and then I would read that SL Introduction
because I think it is an honest self portrait of P's development as
writer and how what he read and what was happening during his early
years as writer, the context,  shaped or didn't shape him, and, I
think there are several revealing statements about how he sees America
and Americans--his subject.

Most of the rest is skimpy and speculative and, when used by scholars,
students of Pynchon, usually weakens rather than strengthens the
argument.

The Playboy stuff ...the Wanda stuff, examples of the skimpy and speculative.


Mark, I think, mentioned this work by Booth, and as I am a big fan of
his Rhetoric of Fiction I decided to get it and read it. Quite dated,
sadly, as it seems that we never read a book for what's in it anymore
but for what we can discover about its author, his politics, his take
on the big questions. What is an author? Foucault asks.

How absurd, it seems to me, to pin an argument on a Playboy interview
or some other scrap of the true cross.

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520062108
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l