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)

[Mark Kohut]

I might suggest "Yes, THAT one"; that is its localized theme---60s being
the locale. Not Lot 49, not Against the Day, not parts of any of them I
would argue and, of course
all the hope ending Mason & Dixon (which could make Rorty's point, of
course).

And whoever thought Pynchon's novels WERE novels of social protest anyway.
They are much deeper than that, we might all agree, offering so much
history and patterning
of America's dynamic to feed protests galore. Validly.  (And we might
remember that letter of TRP's about why he did not go to that one Vietnam
War protest anyway)

Name me a 'social protest' novel that is worth reading beyond its protest?
It ain't *1984 *nor *Animal Farm *nor Malraux's best nor Silone's best
nor *Invisible
Man* nor many others
which are far more than novels of social protest and still live.

.....

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 8:56 AM Heikki R <
situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>