OFFICE: PHINNEY 404 / Thursdays 2-4 and by appointment

ACCESS: 885-4348 (office) / 882-1038 (home) / jgw@uidaho.edu (e-mail)

PROSPECT: The pairing is a little unusual, but not without precedent, and apt: two American novelists with Shakespearean ambitions and sharp eyes for the structural undergirding of American cultural life, molders of language and expanders of genres, invisible for most of their own lives. To point the comparison, guess which of the books listed below inspired this (reviewer’s) sentence: "This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed...." The course’s objective is to provide opportunities for rich, thoughtful reading; scholarly investigations; and adventurous writing.

TEXTS: Typee (Penguin) ISBN: 0140434887

Moby-Dick (Norton)　 ISBN: 0393972836

Pierre (Penguin) ISBN: 0140434844

Billy Budd Sailor and Selected Tales (Oxford) ISBN: 0192839039

The Crying of Lot 49 (Harper) ISBN: 006091307X

Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin) ISBN: 0140283382

Online materials:   
    Melville bibliography--selected recent criticism
    Pynchon bibliography--selected recent criticism
    Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
    Herbert Marcuse, excerpts from Eros and Civilization:  Political Preface, Introduction
    Michael Harrington, excerpt from The Other America
    Realist, Disneyland Memorial Orgy (1967)
    "I  Got Life" from Hair (1968)
    http://www.hyperarts.com/thomas-pynchon/
    http://www.themodernword.com/gr/default.htm
    http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gravity%27s_Rainbow
    http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/rainbow.htm    (Michael Davitt Bell's summary of GR )

PAPERS: Two essays, engaging somehow with both of the writers under scrutiny here, written in a mode appropriate to your career inclinations.　 Those contemplating further graduate literary study must undertake writing involving research and should respond to a scholarly "conversation" regarding the topic.　 I’ll expect to see 20-25 pages total, divided between two essays.

REPORTS: Two during the semester, based on reading of scholarly work on Melville and Pynchon. Reports need to be underpinned by a handout (no more than a single page, front/back) that provides a detailed précis of the argument and an MLA-style bibliography of prior scholarly work that bears on the focus of the article/book.

English 560, Fall 2008: Melville & Pynchon.  Schedule.