M&D Deep Duck Read.

[Mark Kohut]

I haven't yet read Tanner's essay on M &D, but when I get the book I will.
like Alice, I love his insights---when I reread Shakespeare a few
years avon now,
I used Asimov's guidebook of annotations and Tanner's book of readings.

But re the subjunctive: The subjunctive is a grammatical mood found in
many languages. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to
express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion,
possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet
occurred - the precise situations in which they are used vary from
language to language. The subjunctive is an irrealis mood (one that
does not refer directly to what is necessarily real) - it is often
contrasted with the indicative, which is a realis mood.

'Various states of unreality"......is this what an Unreliable Narrator
tells us when it is supposedly the real story of Mason & Dixon?

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 12:05 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good of Chase to caution the reader against rigid definitions; his own
> definition of American Romance, like Tanner's of American Mystery, is
> anything but. Also, with caution against rigidity, we might think
> about M&D as an American Gothic narrative.
>
> On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 9:08 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Alice reminds us that Pynchon writes Romances in the 19th Century,
>> Hawthorne, Melville sense.
>> Richard Chase was the definer of the contours and strength of Romance.
>> Two snippets related to Pynchon
>>
>> "Chase finds in it a new American romance genre peculiarly suited for
>> exploring unresolved contradictions ..
>> While Chase cautions the reader against any excessively rigid
>> definitions of the American prose romance, he does state that since
>> romance as a genre is less committed to verisimilitude than the novel,
>> it tends to veer more toward myth, ...'
>>
>> M & D: Mythic America, full of contradictions, eh? (I went to school in Canada)
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l