It’s a kind of hauntedness that surrounds Nabokov’s vision of aesthetic bliss as one’s response to that autonomous artwork. If you imagine your artwork is living, it can also die. That, of course, I argued in those lectures, opened it up for the threat of mortality.

When we moved on to Nabokov, we had an author trying to imagine a work of art so autonomous from the world that it could be something like an autonomous form of life. And so, beginning that series we had O’Connor embodying a new critical craft of fiction that comes out of modernism, imagining nevertheless that the craft is reflective of a transcendental order in the world, a religious order. After that, I began a series of readings of novels that emphasized more what you might call the history of literature, the history of literature’s forms and ambitions. We started this course talking about Black Boy and the way that a whole world of pressure–political pressure, racial tension–pushed on the borders of that work and actually changed its very material form. Professor Amy Hungerford: Before launching into Pynchon today, I thought I would just take a few moments to look back over the books that we’ve read and talk about the visions of language that they have offered us, and also just to reflect for a moment on the relationship imagined between those visions of language and what is happening outside of fiction in what we might call the real world. The American Novel Since 1945 ENGL 291 - Lecture 12 - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49Ĭhapter 1.

Pynchon the crying of lot 49