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Fw: Pale Fire Mention In Lethem Review
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EDNOTE. This is a nice example of the growing practice of citing Kinbote's
interpretive (mis-)appropriation of Shade's Pale Fire" as the prototypical
case of this wide-spread (mis-)practice of literary criticism. Didn't Bloom
(or someone else) term this "misprision"?
From: "Keith McMullen" <keithsz@sbcglobal.net>
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (23
lines) ------------------
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/books/review/13LETHAMW.html?
> position=&ei=5070&en=2bf7ed89aa9cc190&ex=1087876800&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=
> print&adxnnlx=1087790690-rFzPNNCC744gsh7kyxH1Jw
>
> ''Dylan's Visions of Sin'' seems a conscious attempt to forge a
> post-biographical context for Dylan's art, to sweep away in one gesture
> the defensiveness, gossip and, perhaps worst of all, proprietary
> distortions too often imposed on an artist's legacy while it is still
> in the making. There are those who, like Kinbote staking his nutty
> claim to interpretive possession of the poem in Nabokov's ''Pale
> Fire,'' ask us to believe their approach to Dylanology, pegged on Woody
> Guthrie, heroin or the cabala, is exclusively correct. Ricks, on the
> other hand, has no investment in persuading his reader that his
> particular taxonomical trick, which consists of reading Dylan's songs
> against the seven deadly sins, four cardinal virtues and three heavenly
> graces, is anything more than what William Empson called ''the right
> handle to take hold of the bundle'' -- that is, a reasonably adequate
> stance from which to begin contemplating the artist's accomplishment.
> While using ''lust'' to treat ''Lay, Lady, Lay'' and ''covetousness''
> as a measure of ''Gotta Serve Somebody,'' Ricks grants art's ultimate
> indifference to criticism -- so, despite a tone of vast assurance, his
> book is agreeably humble.
>
EDNOTE. This is a nice example of the growing practice of citing Kinbote's
interpretive (mis-)appropriation of Shade's Pale Fire" as the prototypical
case of this wide-spread (mis-)practice of literary criticism. Didn't Bloom
(or someone else) term this "misprision"?
From: "Keith McMullen" <keithsz@sbcglobal.net>
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (23
lines) ------------------
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/books/review/13LETHAMW.html?
> position=&ei=5070&en=2bf7ed89aa9cc190&ex=1087876800&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=
> print&adxnnlx=1087790690-rFzPNNCC744gsh7kyxH1Jw
>
> ''Dylan's Visions of Sin'' seems a conscious attempt to forge a
> post-biographical context for Dylan's art, to sweep away in one gesture
> the defensiveness, gossip and, perhaps worst of all, proprietary
> distortions too often imposed on an artist's legacy while it is still
> in the making. There are those who, like Kinbote staking his nutty
> claim to interpretive possession of the poem in Nabokov's ''Pale
> Fire,'' ask us to believe their approach to Dylanology, pegged on Woody
> Guthrie, heroin or the cabala, is exclusively correct. Ricks, on the
> other hand, has no investment in persuading his reader that his
> particular taxonomical trick, which consists of reading Dylan's songs
> against the seven deadly sins, four cardinal virtues and three heavenly
> graces, is anything more than what William Empson called ''the right
> handle to take hold of the bundle'' -- that is, a reasonably adequate
> stance from which to begin contemplating the artist's accomplishment.
> While using ''lust'' to treat ''Lay, Lady, Lay'' and ''covetousness''
> as a measure of ''Gotta Serve Somebody,'' Ricks grants art's ultimate
> indifference to criticism -- so, despite a tone of vast assurance, his
> book is agreeably humble.
>