...Dwight Eddins Copyright © 1984 by Duke University Press 1984 ORPHIC CONTRA GNOSTIC RELIGIOUS CONFLICT IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW By DWIGHTEDDINS The most common assumption among the critics of GmuityS Ruin- bow seems...

... to. This year he turns forty-two, mid-career for most writers. Pynchon still does absolutely nothing either to shape or promote a literary persona, and one likes to imagine that his carefully articulated silence after Gravity’s Rainbow, like that which followed The Crying of Lot 49, means he...

... of Hermogenes’ treatise, Concerning Ideas, which lists seven major categories of style (Clarity, Grandeur, Beauty, Speed, Ethos, Verity, and Gravity), each fitted out with a whole panoply of subsections on diction, syntax, rhythm, etc. Hermogenes’ work is a typical example of the Alexandrian penchant...

... the ambiguity by thrusting in the negative direction becomes, after a while, greater than Balzac’s temptation. The word faillite stands at the center of gravity as the clue which alerts and shapes interpretation. The danger of the premise, which is certainly not incorrect, is oversim- plification...

... and punk; and the publication, all in that same year, of such postmod- ernist literary landmarks as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, J. G. Ballard’s Crash, and Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street. In or about 1973, human character changed — anyway, American culture did, according to Killen. My...

... and is the mark of Christensen’s peculiar genius. This won- derfully dense, rich book is characterized by a brilliant, quirky, appositional style of argument productive of its own circumstantial gravity, the term Christensen uses to describe “the textual density that impinges on a reader and inexorably...

... or senses and the mind or senses of others. This necessarily involves the choice of an arrange- ment or form. According to Stephen, there are only three possi- bilities. If the artist himself remains the “centre of emotional gravity,” his images will be set forth in immediate relation to hini...

...! in the sea of life enisled,’ or with the song from the 1960s, ‘I am a rock, I am an island’ ” (p. 26). The Epilogue be- gins, “A sequel to this essay might end with Stephen Dedalus or with mid- night cowboys or with the rocket’s arc in Gravity’s Rainbow” (p. 188). Car- nochan’s net...

... the ambiguity by thrusting in the negative direction becomes, after a while, greater than Balzac’s temptation. The word faillite stands at the center of gravity as the clue which alerts and shapes interpretation. The danger of the premise, which is certainly not incorrect, is oversim- plification...

... have been discussing. There can hardly be a more apt example of confinement than that of the pilot in his cockpit-or a better instance of a striving for liberation from the earth’s hold than flying off into space. Weight, the physical mani- festation of gravity’s resistance to any effort...

.... Klernm deals with the origins of the farce in England from the mystery plays and Lyly down to the Victorian age ; with the main farce-writers of the nineteenth century ; with the themes, the character types, and the plot structures; and with the principal verbal devices. With admirable gravity...

...- cally by saying the Scotch had a sickly imagination and sick pride. “On this stage of the walk,” Sir Sidney Colvin wrote, they [Keats and Brown] were both unpleasurably struck by the laughterless gravity and cold greetings of the people (“more serious and solidly inanimated than necessary...

... emphasized more than anyone else besides Don Cameron Allen the relevance of Origen to Milton, a subject which will one day require its own book. For the other, one must admire the gravity and the courtesy with which he treats the work of his predecessors and distinguishes his own from...

..., as does the whole erber, from the Song of Songs rather than from the Roman de la Rose, she is careful to add that “the poet’s purpose is not, it is certain, to invoke any clear-cut allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs” (p. 17), but merely to “lend his poem gravity, and help support...

... Nature, disparaged it as the work of a naive author relating “with faith and with perfect gravity, all the most absurd lies which he could find in books of travels. . . .”6 Fortunately, as in the case of Chateaubriand, a careful study of the sources, method, and philos- ophy of Animated Nature...

... into “an old magician who had allowed himself to be seduced by Vivien” (p. 241), the wit of his comparison may disguise a subtle shifting of the poem’s true center of gravity. For if “Tennyson put [s] himself into the middle of the poem” (p, 241), is it really in the person of the corrupted Merlin...

... concerned with the third part of Hermogenes’ treatise, Concerning Ideas, which lists seven major categories of style (Clarity, Grandeur, Beauty, Speed, Ethos, Verity, and Gravity), each fitted out with a whole panoply of subsections on diction, syntax, rhythm, etc. Hermogenes’ work is a typical...

... understandings whose truth status has run its course. The book ends with a wonderful epilogue on the gravity of language, an idea that follows directly out of the reading of the downward pull of stones in Elective Affinities into all kinds of depths — ­of the earth, of the past, of memory...

... understandings whose truth status has run its course. The book ends with a wonderful epilogue on the gravity of language, an idea that follows directly out of the reading of the downward pull of stones in Elective Affinities into all kinds of depths — ­of the earth, of the past, of memory...

... understandings whose truth status has run its course. The book ends with a wonderful epilogue on the gravity of language, an idea that follows directly out of the reading of the downward pull of stones in Elective Affinities into all kinds of depths — ­of the earth, of the past, of memory...