MH Abrams

[Dave Monroe]

Abrams Remembers Pynchon
Charles Hollander
Pynchon Notes 36-39, 1995-1996, pp. 179-180

http://www.vheissu.net/articles/hollander_abrams.php

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 3:47 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/mh-abrams-beloved-professor-literary-scholar-dies-102
>
> Abrams, who received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack
> Obama last July, was the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus of English. He
> came to Cornell in 1945 as an assistant professor and retired in 1983. Among
> his students over the years were literary critics Harold Bloom ’51 and E.D.
> Hirsch ’50 and novelist Thomas Pynchon ’59. Abrams was named the F.J. Whiton
> Professor of English in 1960 and the Class of 1916 Professor in 1973.
>
> Abrams conducted classified research at Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustics
> Laboratory during World War II, helping the military solve problems in voice
> communications by developing highly audible military codes and tests to
> select personnel with the ability to recognize sounds in a noisy background.
>
> “The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing – by,
> for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source
> of the power and permanence of literature.”
>
> amen to that
>
> rich
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l