Download or read book Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History written by David Cowart and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Pynchon s California written by Scott McClintock and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Gravity s Rainbow Domination and Freedom written by Luc Herman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Gravity s Rainbow written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1974 National Book Award “A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000, through a wildly comic extravaganza that has been hailed in The New Republic as “the most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II.”
Download or read book Against the Day written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 1584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year 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, gamblers, 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.
Download or read book Mason Dixon Basketball Disasters written by Claudia Mills and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here's the third entry in Claudia Mills' charming middle-grade series. Mason Dixon survived the school choir. He survived adopting his now-beloved dog named, uh, Dog. But now he faces his biggest challenge yet: joining the local basketball team. Not by choice, of course. Not only do his parents encourage it, but his dad even volunteers to be his coach. Now, with his best pal Brody and a team of misfits even worse at basketball than him (if that's possible), Mason must try to rally to beat his arch-rival, the school bully Dunk. Just another day-in-the-life of a disaster-prone fourth grader.
Download or read book Vineland written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.”
Download or read book The Crying of Lot 49 written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.
Download or read book Literary Symbiosis written by David Cowart and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is only the unimaginative who ever invents," Oscar Wilde once remarked. "The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything." Converying a similar awareness, James Joyce observes in Finnegan's Wake that storytelling is in reality "stolen-telling," that art always involves some sort of "theft" or borrowing. Usually literary borrowings are so integrated into the new work as to be disguised; however, according to David Cowart, recent decades have seen an increasing number of texts that attach themselves to their sources in seemingly parasitic—but, more accurately, symbiotic—dependence. It is this kind of mutuality that Cowart examines in his wide-ranging and richly provocative study Literary Symbiosis. Cowart considers, for instance, what happens when Tom Stoppard, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, rewrites Hamlet from the point of view of its two most insignificant characters, or when Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea, imagines the early life of Bertha Rochester, the mad-woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. In such works of literary symbiosis, Cowart notes, intertextuality surrenders its usual veil of near invisibility to become concrete and explicit—a phenomenon that Cowart sees as part of the postmodern tendency toward self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. He recognizes that literary symbiosis has some close cousins and so limits his compass to works that are genuine reinterpretations, writings that cast a new light on earlier works through "some tangible measure of formal or thematic evolution, whether on the part of the guest alone or the host and guest together." Proceeding from this intriguing premise, he offers detailed readings of texts that range from Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror," based on The Tempest, to Valerie Martin's reworking of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as Mary Reilly, to various fictions based on Robinson Crusoe. He also considers, in Nabokov's Pale Fire, a compelling example of text and parasite-text within a single work. Drawing on and responding to the ideas of disparate thinkers and critics—among them Freud, Harold Bloom, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Hillis Miller, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.—Cowart discusses literary symbiosis as Oedipal drama, as reading and misreading, as deconstruction, as Signifying, and as epistemic dialogue. Although his main examples come from the contemporary period, he refers to works dating as far back as the classical era, works representing a range of genres (drama, fiction, poetry, opera, and film). The study of literary symbiosis, Cowart contends, can reveal much about the dynamics of literary renewal in every age. If all literature redeems the familiar, he suggests, literary symbiosis redeems the familiar in literature itself.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon written by Inger H. Dalsgaard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential Companion to Thomas Pynchon provides all the necessary tools to unlock the challenging fiction of this postmodern master.
Download or read book Planetary Pynchon written by Tore Rye Andersen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book reads Pynchon's major novels as a global trilogy about history, modernity and the rise of the Anthropocene.
Download or read book Mason Dixon written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
Download or read book Thomas Pynchon written by Simon Malpas and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback, this is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America’s engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon’s career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon’s relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon’s complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.
Download or read book The Letters of Wanda Tinasky written by Wanda Tinasky and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities written by Erik Ketzan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Pynchon's style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic trends over the course of Pynchon's career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly “Pynchonesque” stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in Mason & Dixon. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon's oeuvre, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow.
Download or read book Failed Frontiersmen written by James J. Donahue and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Failed Frontiersmen, James Donahue writes that one of the founding and most persistent mythologies of the United States is that of the American frontier. Looking at a selection of twentieth-century American male fiction writers—E. L. Doctorow, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Cormac McCarthy—he shows how they reevaluated the historical romance of frontier mythology in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s (particularly regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the treatment of Native Americans). Although these writers focus on different moments in American history and different geographic locations, the author reveals their commonly held belief that the frontier mythology failed to deliver on its promises of cultural stability and political advancement, especially in the face of the multicultural crucible of the 1960s. Cultural Frames, Framing Culture American Literatures Initiative
