Typology, etc.

Alex David Groce · 29 Apr 1999, 12:56 · from urth-v0026.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Alex David Groce" <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Subject: (urth) Typology, etc.
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:56:37
Message-ID: <urth-v0026-0061 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0026/0061.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

	Nigel Price's statements seems to be dead-on-target.  Jonathan
Laidlow's elaborated presentation of Wolfe's modernism also rings mostly tr=
ue.
Wolfe isn't writing a 19th century novel (although the text does, in fact, =
as
Wolfe intends, pull us into an imagined world).  So, arguing about what the
furniture is made of may be pointless at times--but arguments about the
metaphysics of the fictional reality, and in particular the theology and
"economy of divinity" is crucial to understanding the text.
	A purely materialistic "interpretation" seems to both violate the
realistic narrative and the metafictional use of story--it tries to "untell"
what seems to be the central story.  If ULYSSES is a "re-telling" of Homer's
Odyssey in any sense that matters, surely BOTNS is a kind of "re-telling" o=
f,
well, the Bible (with an emphasis on the New Testament).  To "untell" these
central stories is to distort their embodying works.
=09
=09
--=20
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net