Thomas Pynchon

In his 2006 novel Against the Day, set around the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Pynchon renegotiates his relationship with modernism. His juxtaposition of postmodernism and modernism conforms to Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s account of metamodernism. De Bourcier reads the Kafkaesque story of Lew Basnight through Slavoj Žižek’s opposition between modernist absence and “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity.” The chapter examines Pynchon’s engagement with the technological contexts of modernism, focusing on his fictional inventions the Tesla device and the Integroscope, and deploying theorisations of technology by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler. It shows that Pynchon juxtaposes Divisionism—a school of painting influenced by scientific investigations into colour such as Ogden N. Rood’s Modern Chromatics—with Kit Traverse’s embroilment in Futurism and Fascism.

This essay analyzes the fate of peculiar postmodern variants of the picaresque, shape-shifting American romantic hero: Thomas Pynchon’s Lt. Tyrone Slothrop and Harold Pinter’s Quiller, in circumstances that confuse German and American identity.  The essay also considers ways that technology's mere functioning (not its creative use toward other ends) becomes synonymous with public policy or military success in the works examined.

Among the cultural texts used by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) figures a classic fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel”. It is here that the author initially develops the theme of bad parents and victimized children, a subject elaborated throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. By placing the fairy tale in a broader framework of Teutonic mythology, with its heathen gods and goddesses, Pynchon demonstrates the workings of cultural conditioning not only on individual characters, but also on narratives initially unfit in the dominant culture. The theme of “Hansel and Gretel” refers to one of the central questions of Gravity’s Rainbow as well, that of the possibility of freedom for a culturally conditioned entity, be it an individual or a narrative.

Posthuman Suffering investigates the core assumptions of posthumanist discourse via philosophy, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and close textual and filmic readings of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Steven Spielberg's film, AI: Artificial Intelligence, bringing the more ontological and epistemological implications of posthumanism to the forefront. In the age of technology our own limitations are legitimized as unique to the human condition.

" This essay looks at the theme of the Fourth Dimension in Thomas Pynchon's _Against the Day_. Speculations about the existence of a Fourth Dimension proliferated in the period during which the novel is set, and a four-dimensional spacetime continuum became part of the way mainstream science saw the world with the advent of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in the early years of the twentieth century. This essay looks at texts from this period by H. G. Wells, Israel Zangwill, Charles Howard Hinton, P. D. Ouspensksy, Henri Bergson, and Hermann Minkowski, as a way of approaching Pynchon’s treatment of the Fourth Dimension. Hinton proposed the existence of a Fourth Dimension of space; Wells, in _The Time Machine_, called time the Fourth Dimension. The essay argues that these two versions of the Fourth Dimension are equivalent in many ways, including the types of narrative they enable, which tend to be variations on the ancient tale of the journey to the land of the dead. Relativistic spacetime, on the other hand, is something quite different, as it denies the possibility of perceiving all of time as a static whole, which is implicit in earlier accounts of the Fourth Dimension. This essay argues that Pynchon explores the narrative possibilities presented by both the pre-relativistic Fourth Dimension and relativistic spacetime in _Against the Day_, and that by doing so he situates historically the different models of time which he has explored in his earlier writing. "

This essay compares Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and Don DeLillo's "Underworld," by tracking the evolution of paranoia as a cultural pathology typical of the U.S.A. during the second half of the Twentieth century. By deconstructing the popular language of conspiracy theories, both novels testify to the passage from the polarized - and strategic - plot enforced during the Cold War, to a constant state of ironic and self-conscious "dietrologia" in the Nineties. In different ways Pynchon and DeLillo underline the loss of subjectivity in an age characterized by systems so complex that they defy any attempt to attribute individual responsibilities.

The paper begins by analyzing the category of paranoia, evaluating it not simply from a pathological point of view (a Freudian one) and relating it instead to the one Patrick O'Donnell has called cultural paranoia: an interpretative category useful to highlight some common peculiarities of art expressions of the contemporary age. Specifically, the analysis of the emergence of a paranoid cognition in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 offers a passkey to the question about the definition of its author's poetics: paranoia, in fact, seems to work both like a theoretical device that undermines the process of knowledge formation in general, and like a reference to fiction formation itself. Pynchon's poetics, therefore, shows itself as openness to the possibility of a permanently opposed narration, compared to the one conveyed by the dominant power structures.

subgenres in speculative fiction. Past-tomorrows and future-yesterdays: Metahistorical Narratives & Scientific Metafictions is a foray into spatial and temporal grids explored by the literary production of the last forty years. Set at the crossroads of several cultural tensions, the metahistorical nature of contemporary narratives and metafictional approaches to scientific discourses in recent fictions problematize concepts of history and practices of science. By means of a radical fragmentation, ramification, and quantification of the plot, the selfreflexivity inherent to metafiction redoubles on a metahistorical hetero-reflexivity. Likewise, the pluridiscursivity inherent to historicity recoils upon the pluridiscursivity of the novel. "this fiction […] portrayed the nature of narrative history rather than the specific facts of historical accounting." Amy J. Elias "the most arresting, ambitious, and significant fiction written in English in the past four or five decades is, in this way, metahistorical: it summons, fractures, and re-invents history." Susan Strehle "extensive engagement with 'real' history and fictional supplement demonstrates how abstract notation systems (fictions) are complexly embedded in materiality." Sherryl Vint

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-modernism-fiction-and-mathematics.html

Reviewed in:

Sascha Pöhlmann, Anglistik 30.1 (2019). 186-188.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33675/ANGL/2019/1/17

Dirk Vanderbeke, Anglia; Journal of English Philology 137.2 (2019). 363-369.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2019-0030

Johann A. Makowsky, Notices of the American Mathematical Society (in print)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05787.pdf

Faulkner, Pynchon, Conti. Ángeles, aviones, pájaros. ¿Qué figuras se entrelazan con el lema de la Royal Air Force "Per Ardua ad Astra"? Una comunidad de ex-hombres, un ángel mudo, y un hombre-pájaro aparecen en la literatura como alternativas de lo poshumano después del fin de la historia.

While teaching as an exchange lecturer in Mainz, Germany, students misperceived me as a Californian, leading me to an unexpected responsibility for the state's history and culture. As one of my courses turned to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, students' questions about Californian politics motivated me to break with the traditional reading of Lot 49 as a postmodern novel, whose play with textual references precludes any interpretation distinguishing between "fiction" and "history." Instead, I developed an approach to teaching Lot 49 that situates the novel's interpretive difficulties within the historical and political terrain of its contemporary California. At first encouraging students to participate in the paranoid tendencies of Lot 49, floating freely between its many interconnected references and signs, we drew attention to the novel's aesthetic and the way it encourages this paranoia. Calling our own reading practice into question, we then explored the politics of paranoia, complicating the familiar narrative of California's New Left with the less commonly taught history of the New Right. By letting students piece together this political backdrop in the novel, they discover for themselves what their earlier paranoid reading had obscured. Concluding with a portable lesson on the politics of literature, I explain how this approach to The Crying of Lot 49 emphasizes an aesthetic politics: encouraging students to become conscious of the experience of reading a text-both what entices them and what remains at first unseen-and situating that process of reception within the social space of the novel.

Portals: Windows, doors, black holes, white holes and worm holes serve as nodes for transport between different systems of  organization in the works and writings of Marcel Duchamp, and in Thomas Pynchon's novels _Gravity's Rainbow_ and _Vineland_.  These portals enable pivoting between different forms of cognition, in the realm of the social and political with respect to subject positions, and in the realm of the individual with respect to subject formation.  Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and on the cognitive science of Francisco Varela and Edwin Hutchins, a connection is made between an avant-garde modernist, and a post-modern novelist, in their attention to a war between top-down and bottom-up processes in society and self.  This investigation becomes a way to rethink the terms modernism and postmodernism.

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature.

In " The Crying of Lot 49 " (1966), Thomas Pynchon depicts a world in which numerous messages are recurrently generated via simulations and the proliferation of signs increases so incessantly that the original aim of their production is eventually overlooked. The protagonist of the novel is constantly bombarded by an ever-increasing excess of information that makes her life chaotic, seeing that the more she attempts to find out answers to the puzzling questions raised in her mind, the more she gets lost in a net of seemingly associated but actually unrelated data. Suffering from the consequent uncertainty and perplexity, she gradually reaches a state of indifference which is considered in this article an entropic and hence apocalyptic state. Moreover it is discussed here that by exposing the fictional, hyper-real replications of catastrophic historical events of the twentieth century in his novel, Pynchon deviates from the traditional view of history as a linear movement, and envisages an approaching apocalypse for the world. These points are discussed in this article with regard to Baudrillard's theories of " Simulacra and Simulation " and " The End of History " to attest " The Crying of Lot 49 " as an apocalyptic text.

Râsul supersonic al lui Thomas Pynchon. Sesizăm că s-au produs adevărate mutaţii ale ontologicului, incomodându-ne gândirea, mutaţii care au trecut şi în ficţiunea celor mai curajoşi scriitori. Marea Carte care e lumea (romanului apocaliptic)  foloseşte alte semne, o altă scriere, alte experimente, iar partea indestructibilă a omului, aşa cum se relevă ea din aceste ciocniri cu alte medii, îi dă scrisului lui Pynchon acea febrilitate de absorbţie a abisului, inconfundabilă la cei mai mari scriitori ai secolului al XX-lea.

Abstract.
The chaotic world of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, unlike classical Newtonian view of the systems, cannot be explained in terms of matter and force, i.e. its system is so chaotic that understanding its future behavior seems entirely impossible. Therefore, Oedipa’s search for order is never fully accomplished. She tries to decipher of the signs proliferating around her, but either these signs bear no meanings or she cannot sort out the meaningful signs from the ‘noise’. Along with Oedipa, the reader undertakes uncertain attempts to make sense of the whole bewildering miasma of cryptic signs throughout the novel.
This resistant ‘uncertainty’ seems to be a characteristic of the postmodern science that has appealed the literary critics like Jean François Lyotard who employs it to discredit the meta-narratives that he believes has dominated the human thought in most parts of history.  Through discussion of Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’ which asserts that “it is impossible to specify simultaneously a particle’s location and momentum, this article will show that The Crying of Lot 49 is Oedipa’s attempt to achieve certainty (order) but her absurd pursuit of meaning ends in a feeling of paranoia. Thomas Pynchon’s metaphors, derived from postmodern science, parodies the assumptions of American Dream that can be considered a kind of meta-narrative that Lyotard talks about.
Keywords: Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Uncertainty, paranoia, Lyotard, Heisenberg.

This article analyzes the development of noir genre in Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon in 2009. In fact, this novel seems to be a time of reflection about all shifts and changes of detective fiction, starting from the Californian hard-boiled school and the postmodern anti-detective fiction to the contemporary noir. In Inherent Vice Pyn-chon shows his awareness and considerations about the genre tradition to which some of his novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 belong playing out a thought-provoking parodic representation of the detective story and its doom. This paper aims to decrypt the meaning of the references that Inherent Vice contains about noir genre and to detect what is the position of the author in writing this novel.

This paper discusses the function of underground communities in the postmodernist novels Invisible Man and The Crying of Lot 49. While these novels appear different on the surface, there are a surprising number of themes which unite them. My central thesis explains that both the narrator of Invisible Man and Lot 49's Oedipa Maas are disadvantaged characters, due to either their race or gender, and their involvement in underground communities empowers them and gives them a new purpose.

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) met with a lukewarm critical reception. Critics fond of the novelist’s postmodern theatrics rejected its political didacticism, whereas politically didactic critical opponents of postmodernism rejected its lingering individualism and antiauthoritarian thinking. Caught between this rock and hard place, the novel became a casualty of an ongoing battle within the Left between postmodernists and proponents of Old Left structure. Neither camp accurately assessed Vineland, however, because the anarchist politics on which it is structured have been poorly understood in the academy. Turning a historicist eye toward the novel’s portrayal of the sixties, we see that it dramatizes actual debates among the New Left between anarchist figures, such as Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin, and emergent neo-Leninist factions such as the Weather Underground and Progressive Labor Party. Speaking to contemporary leftists, the novel concludes that decentralist and grassroots anarchist politics can mediate between the New Left’s entropy and the Old Left’s hierarchy.

In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Thomas Pynchon depicts a world in which numerous messages are recurrently generated via simulations and the proliferation of signs increases so incessantly that the original aim of their production is eventually overlooked. The protagonist of the novel is constantly bombarded by an ever-increasing excess of information that makes her life chaotic, seeing that the more she attempts to find out answers to the puzzling questions raised in her mind, the more she gets lost in a net of seemingly associated but actually unrelated data. Suffering from the consequent uncertainty and perplexity, she gradually reaches a state of indifference which is considered in this article an entropic and hence apocalyptic state. Moreover it is discussed here that by exposing the fictional, hyper-real replications of catastrophic historical events of the twentieth century in his novel, Pynchon deviates from the traditional view of history as a linear movement, and envisages an approaching apocalypse for the world. These points are discussed in this article with regard to Baudrillard’s theories of “Simulacra and Simulation” and “The End of History” to attest The Crying of Lot 49 as an apocalyptic text.

This PhD thesis focuses on the relations between literary poetics, theories of reading, and the interpretive criticism of an author's work. My approach to this field is through the abundant scholarly writings on the American author Thomas Pynchon, and, in particular, academic readings of his novels. I am trying to study the protocols of reading involved in literary study by mapping out the space between the individual and often idiosyncratic scholarly interpretations and the theories of literary poetics. To this end, poetics is reframed in this work as a theory of reading. In this I am taking my cue from Jonathan Culler, literary phenomenology, and Reader-Response critics. Thus understood, poetics studies those processes of perception, understanding and cognition that underlie textual interpretation and analysis. Within this orientation, the questions of poetics closely resemble those that are today posed in cognitive literary studies, the empirical studies of reading, and postclassical narratology.
The present study rereads the theory of poetics and shows that many devices and textual strategies it describes can be usefully understood as procedures of reading. This is done by looking at the analytical choices made in readings of Pynchon and describing them in terms of reader-oriented poetics. This method zones in on the empirical observation made by many Pynchon scholars. While we generally consider the author’s thematic scope as singularly eclectic as his repertoire of literary means, time and time again we seem to reach the same conclusions: the same themes emerge as crucial, the same devices are regarded as significant, and the same passages from the novels are cited because of their capability to encapsulate something of the elusive whole. But what makes certain themes more or less central? How do some of Pynchon’s structural experiments become so decisive in determining what the novels mean or what they are about? Why are certain key passages so crucial to interpreting the novels?
In answering these questions, the study toes the line between conventions of reading and the cognitive processing of texts. It is discovered that the procedures of reading identified as structural metaphor, miniature analogy, and thematization straddle the heuristic divide. These procedures are, on one hand, institutional and cultural, in how they appeal to convention and tradition. Yet, on the other hand, they contain a component that can be only described as cognitive or perceptual.
The latter part of the study focuses more firmly on Pynchon’s debut novel V. (1963) and its scholarly readings. The theoretical interest in the protocols and procedures of reading is employed as a method for reading the novel and studying how it has been read. As literary scholar Robert Scholes has written, our protocols of reading will yield to methodization only up to a point. This study approaches that point through terrain on which the reading procedures of literary scholarship are entangled with the more general processes of cognition, perception, and interpretation.

Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre» Stéphane Mallarmé 1 4 Utilizzo il termine affidandolo alla spiegazione che ne dà Maurizio Ferraris nel suo capolavoro filosofico, Documentalità, Editori Laterza, Bari, 2009. 5 Nella "biblioteca" di Aristotele (la cui fondazione risale circa all'anno 335 a.C.) vigeva un principio regolatore forte, rigido e comune a tutta la scuola che si la quale sarà affrontata, in forma breve seppur dettagliata, nel capitolo I, ponendola in parallelo alla spiegazione -per parafrasare ironicamente Raymond Carver -di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di romanzo enciclopedico.

The present MA thesis focuses on the function of paranoia found in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's novel is routinely considered one of the finest pieces of American fiction to emerge after World War II and no discussion of this book can avoid this topic. Its usage dates back to the time of Hippocrates and, after centuries of addition, the term paranoia is no longer confined to the medical community. After entering popular usage there is no consensus as to how this term is defined. It now possesses a sort of freedom that Pynchon routinely exploits.
Paranoia resists isolation in this text. The specific approach to understanding its function is dependent on three parts. First, the reader must identify the countless forms of paranoia spread throughout Gravity's Rainbow. Next, one must understand why a specific example from the novel represents a form of paranoia in Pynchon's fictional world. Finally, the reader then must recognize why an isolated form of paranoia is present and what Pynchon hopes to achieve through its presentation.
The paranoia found in Gravity's Rainbow has no fixed meaning. This is a conscious decision on the part of Pynchon and its central goal is to destabilize the entire narrative, which is a central part of paranoia's immense power regularly employed. Therefore, the function of paranoia within this novel first revolves around instability. It is an epidemic and understanding paranoia's function within this text enables the reader to understand the massive role it plays in what is regarded as one of the most important pieces of American literature to emerge post-World War II.
 

This essay deals with the diverging representations of life "on the road" in Kerouac's eponymous novel and in Pynchon's early narrative. Traveling for Kerouac's heroes means keeping on the move, and this, from a literary point of view, questions ideas of narrative closure and character development. In Kerouac's works the figure of the hobo undergoes a transformation: the victim of capitalism, as portrayed in the writing of Steinbeck and Dos Passos, or in the songs of Woody Guthrie, becomes a "road mystic". In Pynchon's short story, The Secret Integration, and in the novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49 it is possible to trace a polemical subversion of many of Kerouac's topoi, such as the traveler, the hobo, the ecstatic jazz player, and the American night. It is a shift away from euphoria and mysticism towards a pensive melancholy and a prophetic allegory of the advent of information and post-industrial society.

of writing which foregrounds an intense awareness of such an alteration of paradigms and problematizition of ontological status is narcissistic narrative or metafiction. This kind of texts is aware of itself as narrative or artifice, and of its functioning and its mechanisms of construction, of its past conventions and its mutation, and of the contentious processes of production and reception of fiction. The metafictional text follows critically and selfconsciously the tracks of the overall history of literary composition and criticism and of its own metamorphoses from the past till the present moment taking as its main challenge and aim the exercise of self-exposition, self-criticism and self-evaluation.

This collection of essays examines the contribution of the aesthetic of the sublime to the representation of the urban field. The corpus examined in these essay ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present. The collection focuses in turn on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century metropolis, the postmodern megalopolis, and the contemporary survival of local urban conviviality.