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 wonder when Rorty wrote this, collected in the Reader in 2010......maybe
as a review or response to Stpehenson's *Snow Crash,*
originally 1993?

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
>>
>