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Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108752705 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 782
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: 1108752705 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 782
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: Tony Tanner Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 100064992X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 117
Book Description
Thomas Pynchon is now recognized as a major contemporary novelist and perhaps the most important American writer since Melville. His work is both richly imaginative and amazingly erudite and can be compared, in its complexity, linguistic playfulness and experimentation and wealth of allusion, to the work of James Joyce. Aspects of history, psychology, technology and science, cultural and political movements, problems of identity and society and the status and function of fiction and narrative in the modern world are all dramatized with extraordinary wit and power. Tony Tanner provides a brief, comprehensive introduction to his work. Against the background of Pynchon the man, this book, originally published in 1982, examines in detail his early short stories (some of which are not easily accessible) and offers a guide to the reading of his novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Many of Pynchon’s recurrent themes, from entropy and information theory to his interest in the operations and divisions of power in the world since the Second World War, are considered. Finally, Tony Tanner places Pynchon and his work in a broader cultural and literary context.
Author: Steven C. Weisenburger Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820337641 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 433
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: Molly Hite Publisher: ISBN: 9780814253267 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
Somewhere near the beginning of this incisive critical study of perhaps the most elusive and, to some minds, structurally disordered of living writers, Molly Hite notes that the idea of order has always fascinated novelists. She attributes this to the genre's being a hybrid, committed as it is, on the one hand, to a rigorous teleology in which events exist for the sake of resolution, and, on the other, to imitating a world that stubbornly refuses to add up. The teleological impetus of narrative, she notes, reflects "a God-ordered universe," while the mimetic tendency describes "a man-centered world." And because the two world views are irreconcilable, they pose a dilemma-the dilemma that Pynchon treats satirically in his three novels: that the alternative to theology is paranoia. In confronting his characters with evidence that either a transcendent power imposes order on the world, or that, in the absence of such a power, all order is illusory, Pynchon parodies a postromantic attitude that takes these extremes as exhaustive. The worlds that Pynchon projects in his three novels-"V., The Crying of Lot 49, " and "Gravity's Rainbow"-are complex and difficult to negotiate; but they are not, Dr. Hite insists, incoherent. And even when they are most bizarre and surreal, they are familiar; for they evoke a multilayered reality in which multiple means of putting things together manage to coexist without ever resolving into a single, definitive system of organization. By placing thematic concerns within the context of Pynchon's experiments with narrative structure and voice, and in this way helping to correct the imbalance that has tended to minimize such formal features, Dr. Hite leads to an increased understanding of Pynchon's spectacle of a postreligious society committed to a vision of apocalypse. Molly Hite is assistant professor of English literature at Cornell University.
Author: Theodore D. Kharpertian Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press ISBN: 9780838633618 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
A study of the major fiction of Thomas Pynchon in three contexts: Menippean satire, post-modernism, and American writing. The critical genealogy of the term satire is discussed and Pynchon's V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow are analyzed.
Author: Steven Weisenburger Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 9780820310268 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
Steven provides a page-by-page, often line-by-line, guide to the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes and puns around which Pynchon wove his novel. This is a guide book to one of the most important, and intractable, literary works of our time.
Author: Judith Chambers Publisher: New York, NY : Twayne Publishers ISBN: Category : Authors, American Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
"When in 1989 Thomas Pynchon came out with his fourth novel after a 17-year hiatus from publishing, it was perhaps not without a hint of irony that the New York Times Book Review turned to Salman Rushdie for commentary. Here was an author forced into exile (literally to save his life) reviewing the work of one who has chosen his own exile (perhaps to guard his gift) - a man who has studiously avoided interviews and about whom little is known. The horrific and absurd situation to which Rushdie found himself consigned was not far from the stuff of Pynchon's fiction, where readers enter a world in which the grotesqueries and banalities of modern life are inescapable by conventional means. With his extravagant imagination and wild sense of humor, Pynchon maintains a revered place in postwar American literature: many believe that his 1963 novel V. anticipated much of the most advanced philosophical and literary-critical reflection that would follow in the next 20 years." "Judith Chambers's comprehensive study of this enigmatic writer outlines a definite progression in his work, identifying his early short stories as more aesthetic than his later work. With V. and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), she argues, Pynchon's writing became more existential and ironic in that the reader is much more an intellectual participant in recovering "meaning."" "By Gravity's Rainbow (1973) Pynchon's style was most decidedly experiential, according to Chambers - experiential in that the novel's truths are contained not just in its content but in its structure and language, which leads readers away from analysis and toward a kind of suffering and risk that become the basis of the novel's affirmation. Chambers places Vineland (1989) even farther along on the road away from an aesthetic or intellectual style. By avoiding "spellbinding" prose, Pynchon in Vineland forces readers to experience a world in which "heartfelt" language is almost "pounded flat" and yet some people do find the courage to act - a courage motivated by the simple values of kindness and love. And, adds Chambers, Pynchon does so without a trace of mawkishness." "Throughout this study Chambers explores the theory of language and thought that Pynchon developed in his writing, looking specifically at his meaning of "decline" by applying the theories of philosophers and writers as radical as he - Robert Graves, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and John D. Caputo. The fundamental question for Pynchon, Chambers contends, is one of hope; this weaver of dark, labyrinthine tales asks whether we can have ethics in a post-modern world. Pynchon answers this question in his novels by creating what Caputo has termed a "cold hermeneutics" - an amalgam of Heidegger and Jacques Derrida - a form of radical thinking that avoids transcendental justification." "Ultimately, Chambers finds that with his eclectic, poetic texts Pynchon destroys the illusions of "truth" and uses the very remnants of this destruction to develop a style that restores the mysterious poetic faculty to thinking. However Pynchon is labeled in this post-everything era of critical inquiry, his embrace of radical and experiential fiction as the appropriate idiom for depicting twentieth-century American life has changed the way a generation of writers has approached their craft."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Author: Tony Tanner
Author: Steven C. Weisenburger
Author: Joanna Freer
Author: Molly Hite
Author: Harold Bloom
Author: Theodore D. Kharpertian
Author: David Seed
Author: Steven Weisenburger
Author: Judith Chambers