Not Pynchon but Tony Tanner-related, good Pynchon reader, we know

[Mark Kohut]

Martin Eve posted about going to hear the author of this book (below) speak
and I mentioned that the wonder notion was Tanner's perspective on American
Lit too

and he confirmed that this guy cited that in his intro. ...I wish he had
written about a few other books different from some of these that he
chose---but he got the RIGHT Robinson, imho,

and the concept resonates like perfect harmony to me. Will I get and read
the ones here that I haven't in order to read it? Will I eat a peach? Will
I live long enough.....will any of *You*, Ish?


*Mere Reading; The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American **novels * argues
for a return to the foundations of literary study established nearly a
century ago. Following a recent period dominated by symptomatic analyses of
fictional texts (new historicist, Marxist, feminist, identity-political),
Lee Clark Mitchell joins a burgeoning neo-formalist movement in challenging
readers to embrace a rationale for literary criticism that has too long
been ignored-a neglect that corresponds, perhaps not coincidentally, to a
flight from literature courses themselves.

In close readings of six American novels spread over the past century-Willa
Cather's *The Professor's House*, Vladimir Nabokov's *Lolita*, Marilynne
Robinson's *Housekeeping*, Cormac McCarthy's* Blood Meridian* and *The Road*,
and Junot Díaz's *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*-Mitchell traces a
shifting strain of late modernist innovation that celebrates a species of
magic and wonder, of aesthetic “bliss” (as Barthes and Nabokov both
coincidentally described the experience) that dumbfounds the reader and
compels a reassessment of interpretive assumptions. The novels included
here aspire to being read slowly, so that sounds, rhythms, repetitions,
rhymes, and other verbal features take on a heightened poetic status-in
critic Barbara Johnson's words, “the rigorous perversity and seductiveness
of literary language”-thwarting pressures of plot that otherwise push us
ineluctably forward.

In each chapter, the return to “mere reading” becomes paradoxically a
gesture that honors the intractability of fictional texts, their sheer
irresolution, indeed the way in which their “literary” status rests on the
play of irreconcilables that emerges from the verbal tensions we find
ourselves first astonished by, then delighting in.