I sometimes think one of the big regrets in my life is I dont have more formal understanding of literary criticism. For the last couple of years, for example, Ive been using Lance Parkins term the Gray tradition, from a blog post he did, to describe the kind of book I find most interesting, but Ive just discovered the terms Menippean satire and anatomy, which seem to be precise academic descriptions of that *thing* that Philip K Dick, James Joyce, William Blake, Thomas Pynchon, Douglas Adams, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Anton Wilson, George Orwell and Jonathan Swift all do. Theyre still not *all* of it -- theres a fascination with Platonism in a lot of the stuff that I like thats not explicitly part of the genre definition as I understand it, and Lances list of commonalities includes a few other things, but its interesting to see that theres an academically-accepted lineage of writers, going back into classical antiquity, doing the sort of thing Andrew likes, and that it has a proper name. Im sure this is nothing new to those of you who did English or Classics at university, but I dropped English after A-level and Latin after GCSE, so its news to me...
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 18:56:39 +0000
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