Bloom's Modern Critical Views - William Gaddis (2004) (298p) [Inua].pdf

Title: William Gaddis (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editors Harold Bloom & Aaron Tillman
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 289 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (August 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791076644
ISBN-13: 978-0791076644

Description:
My Introduction seeks to mediate between the major influences upon The Recognitions and the subsequent influence of Gaddis’s masterwork upon Pynchon and other writers.
Joseph S. Salemi, in regard to The Recognitions, concludes that true art, for Gaddis, offered a secular redemption, while Susan Strehle Klemtner emphasizes common obsessions in JR and The Recognitions.
John Hawkes, Pynchon, and John Barth are linked with Gaddis by John Z. Guzlowski, after which Miriam Fuchs traces Gaddis’s relationship to T. S. Eliot.
JR’s glance into chaos is analyzed by Stephen H. Matanle in terms that evoke the Pre-Socratic shaman, Empedocles, while Elaine B. Safer returns us to the satiric allusiveness of The Recognitions, which she relates to Gogol’s Dead Souls, a novel that Gaddis rightly and greatly admired.
Carpenter’s Gothic, for Steven Moore, is an ambiguous apocalypse, the Revelation of William Gaddis, akin to Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, after which John Johnston persuasively locates in The Recognitions a crucial origin for the Postmodern novel, including Gaddis’s own later work.
Jonathan Raban shrewdly gives us Gaddis as a belated Victorian novelist, almost in the mode of Trollope and praises the comic vivacity manifested by A Frolic of His Own. Rather differently, Christopher J. Knight compares Gaddis’s fourth novel to John Rawls’s theory of justice, while Peter Wolfe concludes this volume with an admiring psychological reading that sees Gaddis as a highly conscious Wagnerite. (- from the Editor's Note).