Author: Luc Herman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820345954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
Herman and Weisenburger put the novel's abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control.
Author: Luc Herman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820346551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
When published in 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon’s extensive references to modern science, history, and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practices taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book’s great theme is domination: humanity’s diminished “chances for freedom” in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket. “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchon’s novel in “long sixties” history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novel’s abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the text’s close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practices—free-speech resistance played out in courts, campuses, city streets, and raucously satirical underground presswork—provide a clearer bearing on Pynchon’s own satirical practices and their implicit criticisms. If the System has jacketed humanity in a total domination, may not a solitary individual still assert freedom? Or has the System captured all—even supposedly immune elites—in an irremediable dominion? Reading Pynchon’s main characters and storylines, this study realizes a darker Gravity’s Rainbow than critics have been willing to see.
Author: Steven C. Weisenburger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of Steven Weisenburger's indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of Gravity's Rainbow--how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of Gravity's Rainbow: Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty "Great Books of the Twentieth Century."
Author: Zak Smith
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 0977312798
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 786
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Book Description
Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated: One Picture for Every Page features the work of an Ivy League-educated, punk-rock, porn-star visual artist who has created a drawing for every page of a novel that is widely considered to be the most difficult work of literature ever produced in English.
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1541
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Book Description
“[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” —The New York Times Book Review “Raunchy, funny, digressive, brilliant.” —USA Today “Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling.” —The Boston Globe Spanning the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving between locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all), Against the Day unfolds with a phantasmagoria of characters that includes anarchists, balloonists, drug enthusiasts, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, spies, and hired guns. As an era of uncertainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
Author: David Cowart
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
For David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon's most profound teachings are about history- history as myth, as rhetorical construct, as false consciousness, as prologue, as mirror, and as seedbed of national and literary identities. In one encyclopedic novel after another, Pynchon has reconceptualized historical periods that he sees as culturally definitive. This book offers a deft analysis of the problems of history as engaged by our greatest living novelist and argues for the continuity of Pynchon's historical vision. -- from Back Cover
Author: Steven Weisenburger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820316680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Drawing on more than thirty novels by nineteen writers, Fables of Subversion is both a survey of mid-twentieth century American fiction and a study of how these novels challenged the conventions of satire. Steven Weisenburger focuses on the rise of a radically subversive mode of satire from 1930 to 1980. This postmodern satire, says Weisenburger, stands in crucial opposition to corrective, normative satire, which has served a legitimizing function by generating, through ridicule, a consensus on values. Weisenburger argues that satire in this generative mode does not participate in the oppositional, subversive work of much twentieth-century art. Chapters focus on theories of satire, early subversions of satiric conventions by Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, and John Hawkes, the flowering of "Black Humor" fictions of the sixties, and the forms of political and encyclopedic satire prominent throughout the period. Many of the writers included here, such as Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon, are acknowledged masters of contemporary humor. Others, such as Mary McCarthy, Chester Himes, James Purdy, Charles Wright, and Ishmael Reed, have not previously been considered in this context. Posing a seminal challenge to existing theories of satire, Fables of Subversion explores the iconoclastic energies of the new satires as a driving force in late modern and post-modern novel writing.
Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108752705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 694
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Book Description
Thomas Pynchon in Context guides students, scholars and other readers through the global scope and prolific imagination of Pynchon's challenging, canonical work, providing the most up-to-date and authoritative scholarly analyses of his writing. This book is divided into three parts. The first, 'Times and Places', sets out the history and geographical contexts both for the setting of Pynchon's novels and his own life. The second, 'Culture, Politics and Society', examines twenty important and recurring themes which most clearly define Pynchon's writing - ranging from ideas in philosophy and the sciences to humor and pop culture. The final part, 'Approaches and Readings', outlines and assesses ways to read and understand Pynchon. Consisting of Forty-four essays written by some of the world's leading scholars, this volume outlines the most important contexts for understanding Pynchon's writing and helps readers interpret and reference his literary work.
Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521769744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master.
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 47
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Book Description
