Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels

Thu Jan 21 11:54:15 CST 2016

Yeahp. As Harrison Bergeron is always saying, "You can say that again".

And, another way of 'labeling' pynchon, or his vision...he is, has always
been,
a hedgehog not a fox in Berlin's nice critical distinction.

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The value of the article for me is almost entirely in its discussion of
> GR, M&D, and AtD as one extraordinarily ambitious project. I take the
> discussion of Engdahl, the Nobel Prize, and the insularity of American
> fiction as what the abstract calls it -- a starting point. The substance
> really begins on pp. 4-6 with discussion of several calls for a "world
> literature" (whether written by Americans or not), and then makes the case
> that Pynchon's Big 3 are, superbly, just that.
>
> The other day, I wrote here that Beckert's Empire of Cotton helps to frame
> important themes of "P's grandest narrative, which is really *everything*
> that boiled out of Europe across five other continents -- plus the
> occasional Vheissu and Vormance ventures -- from 1500 to 2000." That's
> still Eurocentric, but I don't think many Asians, Africans, Australians,
> and non-US Western Hemisphereans would deny that much of their history over
> these centuries was importantly, often decisively *knotted into* that of
> Europe and, more recently, the US.
>
> See, I don't care whether or not Pynchon gets the Nobel Prize. (If he did,
> it would be the 1974 National Book Award or 1975 Howells Medal all over
> again, and we'd have another 15,000 articles about the "reclusive" author.)
> Yes, US fiction *is* comparatively insular, but IMO for predictable reasons
> of history, geography, educational practices, and audience/market size
> rather than out of any innate, US-specific cultural autism or narcissism.
> But what interests, excites and moves me is how successfully Pynchon's work
> "contains everything" -- rather than whether that's what the Nobel
> committee wants (or should want), or whether other American novelists
> should get out more.
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 9:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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)
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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