The Mason-Dixon line was surveyed in 1763-67 to establish the boundary between colonial Pennsylvaniaand Maryland in the century leading up to the Ameri? can Civil War, it was extended theoretically westward as the dividing line between slave states and free,and ever afterwards has indicated the cultural boundary between the North and the South as regions ofthe USA. Generating commentary is, of course, a principal aim of an encyclopaedic novelist, and his choice of lines this time gives scholars an even greater field day for source studies. As far as critical response is concerned, it would seem Pynchon's Mason-Dixon line has done its job. An accompanying bibliography lists over 250 additional printed items (on this new novel alone) and an editor's introduction de? scribes an abundance of Internet sources (three dozen of them, each holding hundreds of entries) accessible by the Pynchon Server List and consisting of everything from home pages for the novel's publisher and the journal Pynchon Notes to a site called 'Gen-X Susan's Pynchon Links' (another fifty-threeofthem, ifanyone is still counting ).
The volume under review prints eleven major critical essays written to order by leading scholars, all the work submitted by June 1998. Yet half a million words are nothing compared to the scholarship that had accumulated just thirteen months afterMason & Dixon was published in 1997. Like the are transcribed by a German V-2 rocket across the sky of wartime London that begins Thomas Pynchon's major novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the MasonDixon line of his latest work is asked to generate a similar half-million-word narrative. Cran? bury, NJ: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses. University of Reading David Brauner Pynchon and 'Mason & Dixon'. As it stands, Millard's book will be a very useful guide forstudents, but one senses that it might have been more than that. 268) would have pursued a 'thesis about the United States as part of a world culture' (p. This becomes particularly apparent in the conclusion, when he writes that 'the United States has been examined in this book in terms of the discrete cultures of the continental interior, but the inclusion of a chapter on the American protagonist abroad (omitted due to limitations of space)' (p. Whereas Tanner was allowed to survey a wide range of writers and at the same time develop a detailed and sophisticated thesis, Millard is clearly constrained by the format of the book he is writing, and by the market he is addressing, so that we are only allowed brief glimpses of where his interests might have taken him. MLR, 98.2, 2003 451 publishing in which monographs are out, and textbooks are in. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
0 kommentar(er)
