M&D preambulatory profferings

[Mark Kohut]

What Morris sez. So modern, postmodern, whatever within the
contemporary culture could we ask that THIS truth too is embodied by
using an
unreliable narrator to tell the M & D stories?.....we all read, we all
narrate out of ourselves.

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 11:26 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Readers all bring their own selves into interpretation. I have known a
> departed P-lister who loved GR as an historical novel. Go figure. If it
> works for you, God bless you. Pynchon is very multivalent.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Monday, January 5, 2015, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
>>
>> It's usually called historiographic metafiction, a kind of postmodern lit,
>> and as such uses textual play like language and structure in addition to
>> parody and revisionist ideas re history.    Linda Hutcheon wrote about it in
>> the 1980s,  prior to Mason & Dixon, but she mentions V. and The Crying of
>> Lot 49.
>>
>> From Hutcheon's Historiographic Metafiction:   Parody and the
>> Intertextuality of History
>>
>> "Historiographic metafiction appears willing to draw upon any signifying
>> practices it can find operative in a society. It wants to challenge those
>> discourses and yet to milk them for all they are worth. In Pynchon's
>> fiction, for instance, this kind of contradictory subversive inscribing is
>> often carried to an extreme: "Documenta- tion, obsessional systems, the
>> languages of popular culture, of ad- vertising: hundreds of systems compete
>> with each other, resisting assimilation to anyone received paradigm" (Waugh
>> 39)."
>> https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/10252/1/TSpace0167.pdf
>>
>> So the answer to your question,  "Who is holding the views that Pynchon is
>> subverting?"  might be everyone's - probably more so in the 1990s.
>> (Historians hated make-believe historical fiction for a long, long time -
>> lit critics hated it for even longer.)   How and where he is doing his
>> subversion is another question,  worthy of volumes.
>>
>> Pynchon is certainly not subverting the views of the colonists, etc.  He's
>> subverting the long-established and nation-building ideas most folks who
>> have "learned" their formal lessons at all have about them (or had in 1997).
>> He's just tossing those ideas around and giving them a little spin without
>> any respect - or maybe with enormous respect - a new respect based on no
>> lines - singled up (AtD), surveyed (M&W), ended (GR) or otherwise.
>>
>> Of course he's writing for those folks who are open and ready to receive
>> those "revisionist" and historiographical and metafictional ideas -
>> probably not for the Texas schools text book committee.
>>
>> Bek
>>
>> > On Jan 5, 2015, at 2:10 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> An excellent discussion on this topic all round.
>> >>
>> >> A question: if Pynchon is subverting the  historical and political
>> >> notions of belonging, who holds the notions he subverts?
>> >
>> > Are these the notions of a reader? One who has notions about history
>> > and politics that are too simple, not Pynchon's,  in need of
>> > correction? What? Are the notions the reader has created by the
>> > narrative? In other words, does Pynchon subvert these notions to make
>> > fun of his readers? To subvert is a tool of the satirists. No? Why
>> > would he subvert these notions, many of them given to or hinted at by
>> > the text? Or by history & politics? To make fools of his readers? To
>> > tickle them out of their foolish notions?
>> >
>> > A Jewish Slave in Washington's home is hardly a method of subversion.
>> > Or is it? More hysterical as I see it.
>> >
>> > Maybe I don't know enough about America to get all the subversion, but
>> > then, is Pynchon writing for only those who specialize in American
>> > Colonial History?
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l