Pynchon's California

Pynchon's California PDF Author: Scott McClintock
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career, Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction. With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the significance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflecting the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) through Inherent Vice (2009). Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “California novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts, forests, freeways, and “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical, social, and historical discourses, offering new ways of looking not only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways, the flagship for postmodern American culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Hanjo Berressem, Christopher Coffman, Stephen Hock, Margaret Lynd, Scott MacLeod, Scott McClintock, Bill Millard, John Miller, Henry Veggian

Pynchon's California

Pynchon's California PDF Author: Scott McClintock
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pynchon’s California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon’s use of California as a setting in his novels. Throughout his 50-year career, Pynchon has regularly returned to the Golden State in his fiction. With the publication in 2009 of his third novel set there, the significance of California in Pynchon’s evolving fictional project becomes increasingly worthy of study. Scott McClintock and John Miller have gathered essays from leading and up-and-coming Pynchon scholars who explore this topic from a variety of critical perspectives, reflecting the diversity and eclecticism of Pynchon’s fiction and of the state that has served as his recurring muse from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) through Inherent Vice (2009). Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the “California novels” to Pynchon’s more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts, forests, freeways, and “hieroglyphic” suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred. The authors bring insights to bear from an array of critical, social, and historical discourses, offering new ways of looking not only at Pynchon’s California novels, but at his entire oeuvre. They explore both how the history, geography, and culture of California have informed Pynchon’s work and how Pynchon’s ever-skeptical critical eye has been turned on the state that has been, in many ways, the flagship for postmodern American culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Hanjo Berressem, Christopher Coffman, Stephen Hock, Margaret Lynd, Scott MacLeod, Scott McClintock, Bill Millard, John Miller, Henry Veggian

Vineland

Vineland PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594632
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human." - Frank McConnell, Los Angeles Times Book Review “Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . .” On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction,” still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. . . . Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture—spy thrillers, ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies—Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in The New York Times Book Review “that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.”

Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The funniest book Pynchon has written." — Rolling Stone "Entertainment of a high order." - Time Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594608
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “The comedy crackles, the puns pop, the satire explodes.”—The New York Times “The work of a virtuoso with prose . . . His intricate symbolic order [is] akin to that of Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Chicago Tribune “A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force.”—San Francsisco Examiner The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

Occupy Pynchon

Occupy Pynchon PDF Author: Sean Carswell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820350893
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
Occupy Pynchon examines power and resistance in the writer’s post–Gravity’s Rainbow novels. As Sean Carswell shows, Pynchon’s representations of global power after the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s shed the paranoia and metaphysical bent of his first three novels and share a great deal in common with the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s critical trilogy, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. In both cases, the authors describe global power as a horizontal network of multinational corporations, national governments, and supranational institutions. Pynchon, as do Hardt and Negri, theorizes resistance as a horizontal network of individuals who work together, without sacrificing their singularities, to resist the political and economic exploitation of empire. Carswell enriches this examination of Pynchon’s politics—as made evident in Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013)—by reading the novels alongside the global resistance movements of the early 2010s. Beginning with the Arab Spring and progressing into the Occupy Movement, political activists engaged in a global uprising. The ensuing struggle mirrored Pynchon’s concepts of power and resistance, and Occupy activists in particular constructed their movement around the same philosophical tradition from which Pynchon, as well as Hardt and Negri, emerges. This exploration of Pynchon shines a new light on Pynchon studies, recasting his post-1970s fiction as central to his vision of resisting global neoliberal capitalism.

Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History

Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History PDF Author: David Cowart
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

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

Against the Day

Against the Day PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594667
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1541

Get Book Here

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.

Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125753
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know?

“From Faraway California”

“From Faraway California” PDF Author: Ali Dehdarirad
Publisher: Sapienza Università Editrice
ISBN: 8893772876
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering a transdisciplinary journey across Thomas Pynchon’s California trilogy, “From Faraway California” addresses the representation of (city)space in the Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice through “geourban” lenses. Drawing on specific concepts in urban and regional studies, the book provides a thorough examination of Pynchon’s spatial imaginary, where the reader comes to understand how his fiction tackles the socio-political and cultural consequences of urban restructuring in the contemporary city and the lives of its citizens. Pynchon’s depiction of California is further analyzed from mythical and environmental standpoints to shed light on his planetary vision and (post)postmodernist poetics in the span of nearly half a century. More broadly, the book’s geocritical and urban analyses of Pynchon’s fiction indicate what might take place concerning the future of urbanism, toward “planetary urbanization” and the formation of the “city region.”

Popular Modernism and Its Legacies

Popular Modernism and Its Legacies PDF Author: Scott Ortolano
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501325132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums. Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book's three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quandaries in the contemporary world. Concluding with an afterword from noted scholar Faye Hammill, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reshapes the study of modernism and provides new perspectives on important works at the center of our cultural imagination.