Author: Hanjo Berressem
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780252019197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Presents an analysis of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland. This work examines these works in the light of poststructuralist thought and literary theory, investigating the notion of subjectivity and the relations between the subject, culture, and language.
Author: Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571134110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
New essays examining the interface between 18th- and 20th-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware, marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor, and "Pynchonesque" has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns -- and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the "military-industrial complex." In short, Pynchon's novels were the sine qua non of postmodernism; Mason & Dixon went further, using the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an 18th century when "America" was being formed as both place and idea. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, as he levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. This volume of new essays studies the interface between 18th- and 20th-century cultureboth in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, as the contributors take up the linkages between the 18th and 20th centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as withthe literary text itself. Contributors: Mitchum Huehls, Brian Thill, Colin Clarke, Pedro Garcia-Caro, Dennis Lensing, Justin M. Scott Coe, Ian Copestake, Frank Palmeri. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds is Professor and Chair of the English Department at SUNY Brockport.
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: Jeffrey Severs
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611490650
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
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. Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide offers eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, each addressing 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.
Author: Shawn Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135492646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
First Published in 2005. While many previous books on Pynchon allude to his fictional engagement with historical events and figures, this book explores Pynchon as a historical novelist and, by extension, historical thinker. The book interprets Pynchon's four major novels V., Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon through the prism of historical interpretation and representation. In doing so, it argues that Pynchon's innovative narrative techniques express his philosophy of history and historical representation through the form of his texts.
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: Martin Paul Eve
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137405503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
Pynchon and Philosophy radically reworks our readings of Thomas Pynchon alongside the theoretical perspectives of Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno. Rigorous yet readable, Pynchon and Philosophy seeks to recover philosophical readings of Pynchon that work harmoniously, rather than antagonistically, resulting in a wholly fresh approach.
Author: Giorgio Mobili
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820497136
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi examines the recurrence of violent body figuration in the fiction of Pynchon, Puig, and Volponi, and also in the fiction of several other postmodern authors who published their literature during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Different as they may be, these authors engage in analogous representative strategies, as their prose is frequently and similarly disrupted by obscene images of wounded, torn, or deformed bodies. In their mix of irony and morbidity, in the hyper-reality of their depiction, in the unwarranted, apparently random nature of their occurrence, these shocking outbreaks exemplify an uncompromisingly «irritable» style which is one fundamental element of postmodernist representation. The author argues how through their fascination with obscene material, these writers address burning issues about the significance of the corporeal in a seemingly discourse-defined universe. This book is a great resource for literary graduate students who are interested in a comparative approach to contemporary literature.
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 143811611X
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Thomas Pynchon.
Author: David Cowart
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Thomas Pynchon helped pioneer the postmodern aesthetic. His formidable body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that anticipate--with humor, insight, and cogency--much that has emerged in the field of literary theory over the past few decades. For David Cowart, 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. Examining Pynchon's entire body of work, Cowart offers an engaging, metahistorical reading of V.; an exhaustive analysis of the influence of German culture in Pynchon's early work, with particular emphasis on Gravity's Rainbow; and a critical spectroscopy of those dark stars, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. He defends the California fictions The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as roman fleuve chronicling the decade in which the American tapestry began to unravel. Cowart ends his study by considering Pynchon's place in literary history. Cowart argues that Pynchon has always understood the facticity of historical narrative and the historicity of storytelling--not to mention the relations of both story and history to myth. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History 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.
