NP Very Misc. Wooden idea

Thu Mar 5 06:40:15 CST 2015

Agree with Monroe,
 just as the great Samuel Johnson's 'mistakes' on
Tristram Shandy and some of Shakespeare, and Saintsbury's misjudgments
and scores of others are remembered as just that, mistakes.

I think Wood's "prestigial authority' keeps most of the current generation of
public critics from recognizing, not even taking seriously or
rereading, Pynchon.
That is being eaten away at by the writers--I love how many writers
confess their
love and indebtedness--and certain scholars--and even historians! (Found many
doing some M & D Google Books searching)

By the way, your precise focussing on texts where Wood can be 'refuted' re
Pynchon is right on, more of the KNOCK ON WOOD book---P does NOT write 'farce'..
where are satirists like Swift (and others). Broad and shallow? Wood
confuses (some of the
surface) for all of the text. Does he 'get' the seriousness overall,
striating every page?
That vision of life and history that the best academics, as Alice has
shown us, do see.

If he is ONLY as good as Fielding canonically,
well.....time will tell.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 6:43 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l