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This part of the review comes dangerously close to clickbait grifting: > Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are sti
by julianeon 4y ago
This part of the review comes dangerously close to clickbait grifting:
> Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are still in print and read by ordinary people, but somehow the arbiters of literary taste on both sides of the Atlantic decided long ago that Pynchon was Not Serious and so Not of Interest.
The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste. So a book cannot be both “an infinite play space” for an audience while being simultaneously “Not of Interest” to that audience. It can be one, or it can be the other, but it can’t be both.
- oska 4y ago> The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so. Professors of literature are a fairly new thing (say one hundred years) while literary taste has been a thing for many hundreds of years. I'd suggest that other/former arbiters of literary taste would include intellectuals, literary salons, the aristocracy, the clergy, other writers, and always too a populist element (books without any appeal to the populace rarely survive to be elevated to the canon).