NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair

[Mark Kohut]

Further reading learns me that Bartleby was published in the book of stories called The Piazza Tales in 1956. I do not know how long that volume was " in print" before the copies sold out or were destroyed but it was never reprinted until the Melville revival of the early 20th Century. 

O'Brien, so deeply aware of Melville's genius in 1931, has barely-concealed scorn for the reading public of Melville's time and his. He writes--predicts-- that Americans will still only see him as a writer of sea stories. Uses the end of Bartleby to sum up Melville in Americans reading mind.  Got that wrong, fortunately. 

By the way, forgot in the first post to mention an allusion to the young Lewis Mumford, another Plist subject, from just an article in which he quotes Mumford on soulless formulaic city architecture as an analogic way of seeing formulaic fiction. 



Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 8, 2017, at 6:21 AM, bulb <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:
> 
> Bartleby was published in 1853.
>  
> Michel.
>  
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Mark Kohut
> Sent: zondag 8 januari 2017 12:10
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Subject: NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair
>  
> Some might find this not uninteresting. 
>  
> Guy named Edward O'Brien,
> who seemed to be the founder, or at least first editor for the annual American 
> Best Short Stories of the Year for a long while, made his bones with
> a book on the American short story to that publication time, which was 1931,
> it seems.
>  
> in this book's preface, one learns that he was friends with Robert Graves (!)
> and his vision of the story is, when it is art, it is the presentation of a new 'form of life'
> on the page. It offers a formed richness of emotions outside of standardized ways of
> feeling. Almost Lawrentian, I'd say. 
>  
> It is THE American art form literarily, he argues.
> America's  novelists ain't like them great English writers, with an exception or two, such as Moby Dick which ain't like them English writers as well. 
>  
> Anyway, he argues that it is around the time of the Chicago World's Fair that
> the short story in the US changed and deepened in the aggregate enough to
> produce a few most important Artists of the genre, of the real and new forms of life.
> From the Fair thru the next 20 years
> of all the new immigrants which produced the seedbed for those richness of
> emotions to overcome the standard US 'frontier' sensibility (in general). 
>  
> I send this re Pynchon as another example of his artistic finding of seminal events
> to frame his novels around. 
> When you go for the King (of Achievements), you better not miss--
> and he doesn't. 
>  
>  
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