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Near the end of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) the novel’s young, searching protagonist, Prairie, is finally reunited with her mother, Frenesi, who abandoned her when she was an infant. After a few awkward moments they move to “a beer and soda cooler beneath an oak tree, where they would sit and hang out for hours, spinning and catching strands of memory, perilously reconnecting” (368). Though the act of reconnecting for the mother and daughter is perilous, there remains a redemptive motion...

In spite of their comparatively light weight compared with such monumental novels as Gravity’s Rainbow (1974), Mason & Dixon (1997), or Against the Day (2007), it seems that, notwithstanding their author’s deprecatory comments in his introduction to the 1984 edition of the collection, Pynchon’s early short fictions continue to appeal to readers. Thus a significant measure of critical attention has lately been devoted to “Low-Lands”, a short story printed for the first time in 1960 in issue 16...

In June 1953, when Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. graduated from Oyster Bay High School, the yearbook editor noted Pynchon had the largest vocabulary in the class. By age fifteen our boy-author was already a noticeable onomatophile, or, from the Greek, a lover of words. We don’t have any evidence, but based on his earliest available writing we don’t think he suffered from the medical definition of onomatomania; “an abnormal impulse to dwell upon certain words and their supposed significance.” Nor...

Thomas Pynchon’s first works, V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), received immediate attention and acclaim from American Literature specialists, but critical production only really took off after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Yet, as early as 1969, Pynchon had already been hailed in France as a major author in contemporary fiction (Brodin). Though less prolific in the nineteen-eighties than its transatlantic counterpart, the French critical outlook on Pynchon was marked ...

Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 has often been thought of as one of the defining postmodern texts. It is built from the fragments of other texts (advertising, radio, popular culture) and features a crisis of confidence in the meta-narratives of state, religion and culture. Pynchon’s attention to metafiction has been discussed at length by critics (McHale, Hutcheon, Docherty), who find in his work a concern less with the classically Realist inner life of characters than with an intertextuali...

Bilingual puns are numerous in Mason & Dixon, and more often than not they take the form of what we will call bilingual jokes, or literal translations of English figurative expressions into a language other than English. Pynchon uses them to excess: “il tartine à la truelle,” to use the pseudo-French phrase. Studying these “foot-of-the-letter” expressions and the way they question the link between language, representation and the quest for meaning is I think a good way to approach Pynchon’s p...

Perhaps the strongest rationale for a philosophico-literary study intersecting Thomas Pynchon with Ludwig Wittgenstein is that, in the writings of this philosopher, the very nature of philosophy is reflexively questioned. Within his lifetime Wittgenstein published a single text, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, influenced by the logical atomists in which he claimed, initially, to have “solved all the problems of philosophy” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus x). However, in 1929 he resumed lectur...

Around each seed of a dossier, therefore, had developed a nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of personality into a past he didn’t remember and had no right in, save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care, which is recognized by no one.Thomas Pynchon, V. (62) “Perhaps we are in limbo,” he said. “Or like the place we met: some still point between hell and purgatory. Strange there’s no Via del Paradiso anywhere in Florence.”“Perhaps nowhere in the world...

In December 2006, Thomas Pynchon wrote to the British newspaper The Telegraph in support of Ian McEwan, who had been accused of stealing a phrase for his novel, Atonement (2001). Presenting himself as a historical novelist, Pynchon used the occasion to consider the question of verisimilitude: “Oddly enough, most of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy. It is that Ruskin business about ‘a capacity responsive to the claims of fact, but unoppressed by them’” (2006b...

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8,1937 in Glen Cove. Long Island, New York. He started his writing career in his high school days, published his early stories in a series of magazines, came to fame in 1963 with his first novel, V., and has since been consistently praised as one of the major American writers of all times. The papers in this volume address all of Thomas Pynchon’s works to date, from his earliest production in Voice of the Hamster to Inherent Vice. The collection brings together fifteen specialists from three conti­nents-America. Australia and Europe. They contribute to the current debates on Pynchon’s supposed ’post modernism, either by revitaliz­ing established postmodern critical perspectives and applying them to seldom read texts, or by reappraising Pynchon’s fiction within broader literary and philosophical contexts. Though individual approaches vary, common concerns are expressed, among which a marked interest in the reappraisal of ethical and political dimensions, as well as a focus on the questions of return and the potential emergence of the new out of the old.

Archival theory’s roots are firmly attached to the pragmatic assessing, organizing and maintaining of the documents of governments, institutions, and companies. Over the course of the twentieth century, its tenets and concerns have intersected with concepts in historiography and have become intertwined with cultural studies as well. An abundance of scholarly work on the archive has been produced within the last few decades across many disciplines and is an emerging and expanding area of inqui...

Avatars of the soul-selling scholar Faust lead a rather spectral existence in Thomas Pynchon’s texts despite the latter’s obvious proximity to Faustian themes and sensibilities. Concrete textual indicators are sparse: Goethe’s drama is alluded to in the short story “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna” and the legendary “German fellow” is named in Mason & Dixon (MD 558). As a representative of Western civilization, however, Faust’s presence seems to be all pervasive, reaching from the title of Agai...

From Mortality and Mercy in Vienna, his first short story, through Mason & Dixon to his later works, Pynchon’s œuvre may be read as a form of resistance to determinations of all kinds. Mason & Dixon rewrites a time in the history of America when a key element in its geographical disposition, later to be known as the Mason-Dixon line, was drawn—a determining boundary for the nation’s future internal strife. No easy line to establish, as the novel amply shows, with the two surveyors in charge f...

In Against the Day, the luminescent afterglow of the Tunguska Event is said to have lasted a month, some terrified witnesses “imagining ever more extravagant disasters . . . . Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor.” As “the phenomenon slowly faded, . . . most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility” (805). These readers are ...

Several critics have seen Pynchon’s early work as a forecast of computer technologies that, in the mid-1960s, were either on the technological horizon or just beginning to emerge in research labs. For example, Brian Stonehill has argued that Pynchon’s early novels are “prophecies of cyberspace” in which Pynchon denigrates the binary mode of thought associated with computer technology since it seems to close off the vibrant possibilities that the analog world offers (11). At the same time, how...

If a Pynchon reader had to pick out a scene from V. that best illustrated how linguistic playfulness serves thematic concerns about paranoia and accident, literary control and general absurdity, he would probably go to the novel’s ninth chapter, entitled “Mondaugen’s story.” This episode, which narrates how a bunch of decadent and racist westerners gather in a fortress in Namibia to escape the 1922 uprising of the Bondel population, introduces two important characters, both German: the first ...

This paper will present an analysis of the attitudes towards the American Dream and money in three major contemporary American novels. The analyzed novels will be The Great Gatsby by F. S. Fitzgerald (1925), On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) and American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). The paper will discuss the idea of the American Dream and its establishment in the American culture, the values that are connected to money and how the American Dream transformed throughout different socio-cultural periods of American history. The paper will outline a historical background of the periods in which the storylines are set. The main part of the paper will focus on the main characters of the works and their relationship with money in order to explore the role that the materialistic part of the American Dream plays in construction of their identities.

This paper discusses the Russian literary intext of “superfluous man” incorporated in the fiction of two contemporary American authorsThomas McGuane and David Bezmozgis, whose main characters are arguably modelled on Pechorin, the protagonist of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Theintext of “superfluous man” is just one example of the reoccurring dialogue between American and classical Russian literatures echoing the trend of the early twentieth century. Russian texts once again become mediators to transcend boundaries and contribute to translating individual narratives into transcultural stories.

The article describes historical realia that Spanglish and African-Aferican authors use to construct metaphoric concept «alien».

For the specific category of novels after September 11, 2001, the contemporary Anglo-American literary theory has created the term post-9/11 novel. Naturally it is a general model which applies to a select group of novels only. As the name suggests, it is a novel responding to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center. From the aspect of literary theory this definition of the novel is an obvious return to the conception of literature reflecting the spirit of the day. Terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (and in British literature also the terrorist attacks against public transport in London on 7 July, 2005) thus create a new historical experience which must be reflected in the aesthetic experience. The principal problem: Post-9/11 novel has not yet been anchored methodologically in any theoretical conception. The result is that simply those novels are included that reflect the event. As a methodological key could serve for instance the application of some theses of Georg Lukács, of course without their ideological connotations. One of his principal theses is that “the greater complexity of social relations requires new means for the new poetry.” From this aspect the majority of the novels on the theme of September 11 do not represent any change, the “pre-September” means are sufficient. Still there is a group of novels which reflect the change of social relations and are real representatives of the post-9/11 novel, because they reflect the spirit of the new times in its totality. They express the totality of the times and the totality of the connections. The change is the better apparent that the authors of these works of prose are successful writers and their books represent a smaller or greater turn in their work. Although the novels are quite different, they share several features: the date of their origin, the response to the “new world” after September 11, the seeking of roots and causes of the present social situation, and the clear formulation of the author’s standpoint, which makes it a committed novel.

With over twenty books to his name, as editor or author, Lance Olsen is a cultural force unto himself. His latest book with Trevor Dodge, Architectures of Possibility (Raw Dog Screaming Press), is a writer's guide against transparent language, and predictable patterned literary convention. In this interview Olsen discusses radical pedagogy and experimental narrative theory and its practice.