Steven Moore Keynote Address at the William Gaddis Centenary Conference

“New Directions for Gaddis Scholarship”
After offering a brief review of Gaddis scholarship over the last forty years, Moore discusses areas of research that have not yet been addressed, and that he hopes younger Gaddis critics will tackle someday.
Steven Moore is the author/editor of several books and essays on William Gaddis, and has written about many of Gaddis’s literary acquaintances in MY BACK PAGES: REVIEWS AND ESSAYS. His new edition of THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM GADDIS is due out in April 2023 from New York Review Books. He is also the author of the two-volume survey THE NOVEL: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY and of books on Ronald Firbank and Alexander Theroux.
The address was delivered on October 20, 2022 at Washington University in St. Louis. For more on the Conference, visit sites.wustl.ed...

[@valpergalit]

The phenomenon Moore mentions about readers latching onto inaccuracies first introduced by bad reviewers is painfully true - and it’s become even worse on the Internet, where anyone can say anything they want about a novel, whether accurate or not, and other people slurp it up regardless. Pynchon readers are notorious for it.

[@AleksandarBloom]

Authors live and die by those speculations and theories, especially those as Pynchon and Gaddis. Let them be. Problem are not those, aforementioned, out-there hypothesis per se, but gullible people who accept them uncritically, particularly those which hold formal, say, academic positions, and then make a law or rule out of them, push them on others. "Whether accurate or not" is beyond anybody anyway, 'play' is more important.

[@bedhead9975]

14:30

[@Johnconno]

So by the time he was in the ground he was a goddamn superstar? 🌹