Ted Hand: @17beowulf I'm sure there are a ton of closet RAW fans in English departments by now. We need more graduate students interested+brave enough
Ted Hand: @17beowulf It should simply be obvious that RAW was doing something really interesting when he applied Cabala and Semantics to Joycean prose
John Merritt: @t3dy Joyce & Pound's influence on RAW: two dissertations looking for authors. But RAW's too plebeian for snooty English departments.
John Merritt: @t3dy To you and I, yes. To theory addicted English professors, maybe not.
John Merritt: @t3dy The problem is waiting for the oldsters to retire, like the Yeats "expert" I know who won't touch "A Vision" or the G. D. stuff.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf Burroughs and Dick have prepared the way, I suspect. But I understand the pessimism. Might be quitting academic for good myself.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf I guess we need to encourage more students to publish papers addressing theory addict concerns with RAW, easy to do I'm sure
Ted Hand @17beowulf That's ridiculous. To refuse to study something your guy wrote? Golden Dawn is getting plenty of scholarly attention in rel.stud.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf illuminatus! would be perfect for an American Studies course on the 60's, but I like reading it as a critique of Hobbes+Ayn Rand.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf really we need to do linguistics to understand what he's doing when he plays around with post-joycean prose. interdisc. RAWstudy!
John Merritt: @t3d, Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. Detectives and SF were once off limits also. RAW uses tropes from both.
John Merritt: @t3dy Hammett's Continental Op is in Schroedinger's Cat.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf yeah I would love to see a study of Detective story in illuminatus! I like to compare it to Firesign Theatre Giant Rat of Sumatra
Ted Hand: @17beowulf since RAW was in some ways a card-carrying postmodernist, but especially since he misunderstood so much, he should be theory gold
Lots of other RAW observations recently from Ted Hand. I'll reprint some tomorrow.
3 comments:
I wrote my master's thesis on "The Influence of Finnegans Wake on Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati" at Cal State San Bernadino. I did have a hard time getting it approved. I went through 23 versions of my thesis proposal.
You should publish it, Eric. It would be great to read!
I have incorporated it into my new book which I plan to finish in 2012.
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