NP Very Misc. Wooden idea

[Dave Monroe]

To answer yr last Q:, A: No.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:52 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Instead of knocking on James Wood I'd rather try to understand this
> very curious situation in which "the" Uber anglo critical voice de
> jour finds so much fault in the work of such a widely acclaimed
> novelist. How would you explain this to someone unfamiliar to all this
> talk of books and writing? Shouldn't scholars of Pynchon's work be
> able to account for this with more than, "Wood has it all wrong" or
> 'different strokes for different folks'? Are polemics and relativism
> the only options?
>
>    "It has to be acknowledged, therefore, that it is historical
> analysis which allows us to understand the conditions of the
> 'understanding', the symbolic appropriation, real or fictive, of a
> symbolic object which may be accompanied by that particular form of
> enjoyment which we call aesthetic."  A bit further on Bourdieu adds to
> this: "... the foundation of belief... resides in the illusio, the
> adherence to the game as a game, the acceptance of the fundamental
> premise that the game, literary or scientific, is worth being played,
> being taken seriously."
>
>    Wood takes literature very seriously and has taken a series of
> positions that has led to his present place in the field of literary
> criticism.
>
>   Wood has praised W.G. Sebald for his "great powers of reticence and
> understatement"; Sebald is a serious writer. Compare this to how Wood
> loads his review of AtD with terms like: manic, vaudeville, larking,
> and accuses TP of being enamored of the "farcelike, overlit
> simplicities of Fielding", and later warns that "as in farce, the cost
> to all seriousness is considerable." You see, Pynchon is not serious,
> thus the title of the review: "All Rainbow, No Gravity".
>
>    This offends Wood. It comes through in his M&D review where he
> writes:  "So this is America in the 1760s. But really, it is the
> thickly sown lot of Pynchon's mind. For the wartime London of
> Gravity's Rainbow is a similar place, less a city of one noble British
> defense than the site of internecine paranoias, a city of shadowy
> groupings and official acronyms..." How dare Pynchon treat something
> so serious as the Blitz with a scene about bananas? Wood seems to have
> forgotten or to be unaware of what Hayden White tried to argue about
> how we emplot events through narrative modes. (Still, I bet James Wood
> laughs at the 'Bring out your dead' scene by the Monty Python!) It all
> makes me think of what Steve Jobs said about Gates: "He'd be a broader
> guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an Ashram when he was
> younger." Of course, Jobs was talking about a reorientation that
> fundamentally repositions one. The closest to that  we may see with
> Wood is his shifting postion on a writer like DFW (see
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsbKT50ud04 about 6 mins in) about
> whom Wood claims "my blindnesses have been educated".
>
>   A question arises: Now that Wood has gone to Harvard, will his
> vision be further educated? But there is also a different question.
> The early critical literature around Pynchon's early work is still
> valuable to students of Pynchon's work, will Wood's critical essays
> (in reality reviews republished as essays) be valuable to future
> Pynchon scholars when studying later Pynchon writings?
>
> ciao
> mc otis
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>> OK, I bite.
>>
>> That Wood is an a-historical phony becomes obvious not only where he disses
>> authors like Pynchon but also where he is on a mission to re-introduce
>> authors from classical modernity.
>>
>> Look at this - doubtlessly: inspired - review of Hamsun from 1998:
>>
>> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n23/james-wood/addicted-to-unpredictability
>>
>> ("Hunger" is a hell of a book --- go and read it if you can!)
>>
>> The sentence which is so extremely stupid is the following:
>>
>>> His senseless hatred of England – he never supplied any reason for this
>>> prejudice – drove him into a mindless veneration of Germany. <
>>
>> "(H)e never supplied any reason for this prejudice(?)" This is bullshit.
>> Now, Hamsun was an anti-globalist writer, one of the first. It isn't for
>> nothing that the words "earth" and "soil" pop up so often in his work. The
>> clearest expression of Hamsun's anti-globalist message can be found in the
>> novel "August" (dt. August Weltumsegler) from 1930, which explicitly
>> articulates anti-capitalism as anti-globalism, but it goes all through his
>> work and can also be found in his journalism. And which nation did represent
>> the indivisible world-market in Hamsun's times? That's the UK. So, is James
>> Wood an idiot? No, of course not. Probably he just wanted to push Hamsun and
>> make him more read among anglophone readers. As likable as that is, as off
>> turning is his phony acting stupid. I really despise this ...
>>
>>
>>
>> On 02.03.2015 12:40, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>>
>>> We should gather all our Wood thoughts and self-publish them.
>>> Knock(s) on Wood.
>>>
>>> We might get, Oh, 3--5 buyers outside of ourselves (but I bet even
>>> we won''t buy it. Why should we, they are all here).
>>> -
>>> 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/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l