NP but Richard Rorty, yet could gloss (some of) visionary Pynchon, yes? (This from a review in LA Review of Books about new collection of lectures)

[Heikki R]

Rorty, however, seemed to regard Pynchon as something of an
anti-Emerson/Whitman/Dewey...

"Snow Crash capitalizes on the widespread belief that giant corporation,
and a shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an agent for the
corporations, now make all the important decisions.  This belief finds
popular expression in popular thrilers like Richard Condon's The Manchurian
Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more ambitious works like Thomas
Pynchon's Vineland and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  The view that the
visible government is just a false front is a plausible extrapolation from
the fact that we are living in a second Gilded Age: even Mark Twain might
have been startled by the shamelessness with which our politicians now sell
themselves. Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's, and Pynchon's are novels
not of social protest but of rueful acquiescence in the end of American
hopes...."

>From The Rorty Reader, ed. Voparil and Bernstein, Wiley-Blackwell 2010, p.
373

On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 1:14 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> “I should like to make it sound attractive by dubbing it ‘American’,” he
> writes with his usual dash of irony, “construing it as the idea common to
> Emerson and Whitman, the idea of a new, self-creating community, united not
> by knowledge of the same truths, but by sharing the same generous,
> inclusivist, democratic hopes.”
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>