ONLINE SEMINAR
Gravity’s Rainbow and Pynchon’s Surrealist Protest

Description

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LEADER

John Riley has conducted seminars for nearly 40 years, serving on the faculties of Benedictine University, Morton College and while employed at the Great Books Foundation. Both as a teacher and while seeking his degrees, John concentrated on modern and postmodern literature and literary criticism, including the works of Joyce, Camus, Márquez and Ellison.

BOOK

Gravity’s Rainbow , by Thomas Pynchon, (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
ISBN-13: 9780143039945

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Gravity’s Rainbow is a 776-page tour de force/farce/fantasy/futility/fungibility/fornication, and fevered imagination. It is one of the most tangled yet insightful American novels of the 20th century, a work that recognizes that the wanton destruction, callousness and randomness of the modern world is hardly suited to a conventional, easily decipherable narrative treatment.

So what lies at the end of this “Rainbow”? Humanity, in a word. Facing the soul-crushing “facts” of the physical world and our capacity for evil, in us there still exists something to fuel the struggle against these forces. Humanity can sometimes make a place in the moment when we can’t find our place in the universe. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the postwar literature canon.

“Is it worse being sold,
For those handfuls of gold,
Than to sigh all your real-life, away?”
— Merciful Evans, Gravity’s Rainbow

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Classical Pursuits will record this seminar, and make each session privately available to registered participants for up to two weeks after that session.

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