Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels

[Mark Kohut]

To All Relative Newbies on the Plist.

This shows what levels of connection and textual memory you might get to
if you read Gravity's Rainbow ten times. And the others more than once or
twice. As I
am always saying, if we all were closer to the Janeites or Proust readers,
it
would be a better world!


I urge you to read this before the GR read, if you haven't.
Tore Rye, who might still be a quiet lurker on the Plist is or was on for a
long time.
(here--or offlist?) is where I learned he may have read GR ten times and,
therefore
what a slacker I have been all my life. Or, to repurpose James Wright's
line: I
have wasted my ( reading) life.

Tore should be hosting the read but he also has a real life AND, none of
this is to intimidate
even if you have never read GR (or finished it. Like Norman Mailer). Asking
any questions
is one of the best ways, as we can see from Mike's posting for his new
translation, to touch bottom
in the text. ---there are no stupid questions as the lie in the classroom
and the business world goes,---
but it may, like little spots of anarchy in Pynchon's worlds, be true here.

Tidbit. I once posted here that Against the Day 'contained everything'. Tore
posted that GR "contained everything". we had a fun exchange akin to
mathematicians
talking about sizes of infinity when I attempted to trump him with "Against
the Day contains everything
& GR".....(I only mean this in a fun, limited way, of course.)

As I have told Tore directly, when I read Swedish Academy guy Engdahl say
what he did about
American literature I knew why TRP would not get a Nobel. They had to know
that, even without
Tore showing all the interconnections among the works, ATD showed his was a
world imagination.
So, he had been ruled out for other reasons. (I have an unproveable notion
regarding that).

Mark
PS. Waiting for Godot Not. (Laura you are going to regret all the time
you've given me. An improv jazz-like
mostly soloing i had figured, it won't be. Big jazz band I hope with as
many characters and plot strands
as Against the Day.) Get all your slacker friends aboard. Tore's piece
shows why no serious contemporary
reader CAN NOT read Pynchon in depth. (I loved how mini Franzen appears
herein.)


On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Martin Eve <martin at martineve.com> wrote:

> Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels
>
> Tore Rye Andersen
>
> Taking Horace Engdahl’s critique of the insularity of American literature
> as its starting point, the essay goes on to discuss Richard Gray’s and
> Michael Rothberg’s recent articles in American Literary History, both of
> which call for a literature capable of addressing the contemporary global
> reality. While both Gray and Rothberg claim that such a literature has yet
> to be written, the essay argues that Thomas Pynchon’s three novels
> Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day can profitably be read
> together as an ambitiously conceived world-historical trilogy which tells
> the story of the gestation and emergence of our contemporary global reality.
>
> Published in Orbit. http://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.178
> --
> Dr. Martin Paul Eve
> Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing
> Birkbeck, University of London
>
> T: 0203 073 8420
> E: martin.eve at bbk.ac.uk
> W: https://www.martineve.com
> R: 416, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
>
> Password [a cultural history]: http://meve.io/password
> Pynchon and Philosophy: http://meve.io/pynchonphilo
> Open Access and the Humanities: http://meve.io/oahums
>
> Director, Birkbeck Centre for Technology and Publishing
> Founder, Open Library of the Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org)
> Chief Editor, Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon (https://www.pynchon.net)
> Senior Online Editor, Alluvium, (http://www.alluvium-journal.org)
> -
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