The Postmodern Self in Thomas Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

The Postmodern Self in Thomas Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49 AKADEMIN FÖR UTBILDNING OCH EKONOMI Avdelningen för humaniora The Postmodern self in Thomas Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49 Dismantling the unified self by a combination of postmodern philosophy and close reading Andreas Signell 2015-16 Uppsats, Grundnivå (Studentarbete övrigt) 15 hp Engelska med ämnesdidaktisk inriktning (61-90) Ämneslärarprogrammet med inriktning mot arbete i gymnasieskolan 0030 Uppsats Handledare: Iulian Cananau, PhD Examinator: Marko Modiano, docent Abstract This essay is about identity and the self in Thomas Pynchon's critically acclaimed masterpiece The Crying of Lot 49. Through a combination of postmodern philosophy and close reading, it examines instances of postmodernist representations of identity in the novel. The essay argues that Pynchon is dismantling the idea of a unified self and instead argues for and presents a postmodern take on identity in its place. Questions asked by the essay are: in what ways does Pynchon criticize the idea of a unified self? What alternatives to this notion does Pynchon present? The essay is split into six chapters, an introductory section followed by a background on Thomas Pynchon and the novel. This is followed by an in-depth look into postmodernism, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's importance for it, as well as the basic concepts of his philosophy. This is followed by the main analysis in which a myriad of segments and quotations from the novel are looked at. Lastly, this is followed by a summarizing conclusion. The essay assumes a postmodernist approach of not being a definitive answer; rather it is one voice among many in the community of Pynchon interpreters. The conclusion shows that the examples given in the analysis present a range of answers as to how Pynchon dismantles the self, and what alternatives he presents in its wake. Pynchon explores the Cartesian ego, Lacanian other, Freudian ego and postmodernist alternatives in the novel, and presents in postmodern fashion, a multitude of answers as to how he dismantles the idea of a unified self in the novel. Keywords: Pynchon, self, identity, postmodernism, Wittgenstein Table of Content 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 2. Method and Materials ..................................................................................... 5 3. Background ...................................................................................................... 6 3.1 Thomas Pynchon ............................................................................................................ 6 3.2 The Crying of Lot 49 ....................................................................................................... 8 4. Postmodernism ................................................................................................ 9 4.1 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Postmodernism ................................................................. 12 5. Analysis ........................................................................................................... 13 6. Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 27 Works Cited ....................................................................................................... 30 1 1. Introduction Thomas Pynchon is both a critically acclaimed writer and a divisive author at the same time. He stands as one of the foremost figures of postmodernism in literature and many critics hail him as the quintessential postmodern author. His novels have received such acclaim as redefining postmodernism, and, subsequently, many are a major part of the postmodern canon of literature. Yet his novels have been criticized for being crass and obscene, over convoluted and a mockery of high culture. It is this blend of styles that truly exemplifies Pynchon; he explores everything from low to high culture and produces a jumble of the two. Pynchon's work is divisive as it requires the reader’s full attention. His superfluous style of writing is bound to confuse some readers, and the immense scale and complexity of his work spans everything from "simple" detective stories to metahistorical retellings featuring over 400 characters in the same book and multiple narrators each with their own unique style. An apt comparison to make as to both how complex and nuanced Pynchon's work is to imagine an anthill sprawling deep underground with thousands of elaborate passageways to thousands of different events, organizations and characters. This is in many ways what reading a Pynchon novel is like; once the readers thinks and can guess what is coming, Pynchon goes off on a completely different tangent and leaves the reader dazed and confused. In some sense then, this is the main reason why his novels are so divisive; either one gets frustrated at Pynchon’s stubbornness to provide no answers and further convolute his plots, or one goes along for the ride and metaphorically follows the white rabbit down the hole into Wonderland. At the end of his novels, what began as a rather simple story along a straight path has evolved into a labyrinth of endless hallways. This is why, when analyzing and interpreting Pynchon, one can go almost anywhere with his writing since it is so immense in its scope. Analysts and critics have interpreted Pynchon in almost every possible way, from Marxist analyses to new historicist readings, and this has given rise to a growing community of Pynchon interpreters. Since the author is unwilling to share answers due to his reclusive nature, critics and analysts are left wondering as to what may or may not be the true intent of Pynchon. Therefore, the best an analysis can hope for is to metaphorically not make it out of the labyrinthine maze of the novel, but rather become another dead end in the ever-growing scope that is Pynchon's writing. This essay then becomes another thread to pick up on and unravel, in hope of reaching some answers, but not definitive ones, as the postmodern nature of Pynchon's work shies away from the grand narratives of the past and seeks refuge in the little narratives, providing not the answers, but an answer. Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy stands as a 2 precursor to postmodernism, said in his masterpiece Thus Spake Zarathustra that "This- is now my way,- where is yours?' Thus did I answer those who asked me 'the way.' For the way- it does not exist!" (152). The phrase is now often simplified as "You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist". This is the same mentality one must assume when analyzing Pynchon directly. Similarly, Brian McHale advises critics: "[...] to approach Pynchon head-on (or as nearly head-on as the special difficulties of his texts permit), and then one has some chance of finally reaching the hilltop, from where it is possible to survey the entire countryside." (Postmodernist Fiction 10) The notion of the unified self that this essay uses is a common notion in philosophy of the self, but requires some explanation. The unified self is to some degree an essentialist idea, that there is some entity or function that constitutes the self as a unified being in and of itself, i.e. it is a substance, whether it be graspable (such as the body or brain) or ungraspable (such as the soul or mind). Thus, the belief in a unified self is the belief that there exists some entity in each person that constitutes their individual self. Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris has criticized the idea of a unified self in his book Waking Up: As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and multifarious. There is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. Everything that makes us human— our emotional lives, capacity for language, the impulses that give rise to complex behavior, and our ability to restrain other impulses that we consider uncivilized— is spread across the entirety of the cortex and many subcortical brain regions as well. The whole brain is involved in making us what we are. So we need not await any data from the lab to say that the self cannot be what it seems. (115-116) This is just one of the explanations why the notion of the conventional self is under scrutiny in philosophy, and has been so from the beginnings of philosophy itself. Pynchon began exploring the main topic of this essay, namely the self, in his first novel V. in it he describes identity as a multifaceted subject: I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I 3 am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government, the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night. (283) Yet it is in The Crying of Lot 49 (hereinafter abbreviated as Lot 49) that Pynchon truly delves into the topic of the self and identity. Pynchon in many ways performs a tour de force through history and his interpretations of the self in the novel stretch from René Descartes' "Cogito
Recommended publications
  • Curriculum Vitae
    JOSEPH ACQUISTO Professor of French Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Linguistics University of Vermont 517 Waterman Building Burlington, VT 05405 [email protected] (802) 656-4845 EDUCATION Yale University Ph.D., Department of French (2003) M.Phil., French (2000) M.A., French (1998) University of Dayton B.A., summa cum laude, French (1997) B.Mus., summa cum laude, voice performance (1997) EMPLOYMENT HISTORY Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Linguistics, University of Vermont 2016-present Professor of French, University of Vermont 2014-present Associate Professor of French with tenure, University of Vermont 2009-2014 Assistant Professor of French, University of Vermont 2003-2009 BOOKS 7. Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, under consideration 6. Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 5. The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Paperback edition 2016. 4. Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections, co-edited volume with Adrianna M. Paliyenko and Catherine Witt. London: Institute of Modern Languages Research, 2015. 3. Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry, edited volume. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 1 2. Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. Paperback edition 2014. 1. French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. EDITED SPECIAL ISSUE The Cultural Currency of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry, a special double issue of Romance Studies (26:3-4, July/November 2008) co-edited and prefaced with Adrianna M.
    [Show full text]
  • The Crying of Lot 49” (And How Not To)
    1 FLESHING OEDIPA OUT How to Read “The Crying of Lot 49” (and How Not To) The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon’s shortest book, and some of its flaws probably result from its compactness. The jokey names, for instance, a feature of all of his books, can annoy some readers more here; I think it is really the sketchiness of the structure that grates—though less obtrusively to an average reader’s consciousness, perhaps, so that the names are what seem to cause the annoyance. The book’s shortness is probably what, with Pynchonian irony, attracts a certain type of reader who is less than prepared to contend with anything but the surface. The problem that Pynchon did not quite solve (though he is in my opinion too hard on himself in his retrospective comment1) is that while the book needed to be concise and is in fact the right length, the patented Pynchonian unraveling of the plot was harder to achieve in so short a space. The reader can become, like the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, “saturated” (177—all references to the first edition), overwhelmed by detail. Among other lapses, the concision leads to several clunky topic sentences (“Things then did not delay in turning curious” [44]). The introduction of an (imaginary?) postal service that has maintained itself for centuries in a shadowy parallel existence outside official history, is especially clumsy, and evokes sentences rankly amateurish, for example: “So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero” (54; I will use this spelling throughout, not Trystero).
    [Show full text]
  • Thomas Pynchon: a Brief Chronology
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln 6-23-2005 Thomas Pynchon: A Brief Chronology Paul Royster University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Royster, Paul, "Thomas Pynchon: A Brief Chronology" (2005). Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries. 2. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Thomas Pynchon A Brief Chronology 1937 Born Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., May 8, in Glen Cove (Long Is- land), New York. c.1941 Family moves to nearby Oyster Bay, NY. Father, Thomas R. Pyn- chon Sr., is an industrial surveyor, town supervisor, and local Re- publican Party official. Household will include mother, Cathe- rine Frances (Bennett), younger sister Judith (b. 1942), and brother John. Attends local public schools and is frequent contributor and columnist for high school newspaper. 1953 Graduates from Oyster Bay High School (salutatorian). Attends Cornell University on scholarship; studies physics and engineering. Meets fellow student Richard Fariña. 1955 Leaves Cornell to enlist in U.S. Navy, and is stationed for a time in Norfolk, Virginia. Is thought to have served in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. 1957 Returns to Cornell, majors in English. Attends classes of Vladimir Nabokov and M.
    [Show full text]
  • A New Decade for Social Changes
    Vol. 21, 2021 A new decade for social changes ISSN 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com 9 772668 779000 Technium Social Sciences Journal Vol. 21, 846-852, July, 2021 ISSN: 2668-7798 www.techniumscience.com The concept of transcendence in philosophy and theology Petrov George Daniel Theology Faculty, Ovidius University – Constanța, România [email protected] Abstract. The transcendence of God is the most sensitive and profound subject that could be addressed by the most enlightened minds of the world. In sketching this concept, the world of philosophy and that of theology are trying the impossible: to define the Absolute. Each approach is different, the first being subjected to reason, reaching specific conclusions, and the second, by understanding God's Personal character, appealing to the experience of living your life in God. The debate between the two worlds, that of philosophy and that of theology can only bring a plus to knowledge, while impressing any wisdom lover. Keywords. God, transcendence, immanence, Plato, Cioran, Heidegger, Hegel, Stăniloae I. Introduction The concept of transcendence expresses its importance through its ability to attract the intellect into deep research, out of a desire to express the inexpressible. The God of Theology was often named and defined by the world of philosophy in finite words, that could not encompass the greatness of the inexpressible. They could, however, rationally describe the Divinity, based on the similarities between the divine attributes and those of the world. Thus, in the world of great thinkers, God bears different names such as The Prime Engine, out of a desire to highlight the moment zero of time, Absolute Identity and even Substance, to express the immateriality of the Cause of all causes.
    [Show full text]
  • The American Dream in the Crying of Lot 49
    Filología y Lingüística xvnm» 39-44, 1992 PYNCHON'S PARABLE: THE AMERICAN DREAM IN THE CRYING OF LOT 49 Kari Meyers Skredsvig ABSTRACT Although the innovative style of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying 01 Lot 49 is both the delight and the despair of its readers, its impact derives from the mythopeic content and historical contexto In this short novel, Pynchon joins !he ranks of U.S. writers who explore individual and national identity in terms of social mythology. The American Dream is an integral people called upon to live in perfect, timeless componentof the history, literature, and lives of harmony with God and nature. the people of the United States. Not only has it The perpetration of this national covenant greatly influenced the politics, economic and depended upon their ability to avoid the parasitic socialprogress, and cultural values of the country, complexity of historical institutions, thus giving it has also shaped the spiritual and psychological rise to the insistence upon individual rights and development of both individuals and the responsibilities which is the basis not only for Americancomrnunity as a whole.' For over three American democracy, but also for the propagation hundred years, the American Dream has been of the American Dream. defined,revised, analyzed, and interpreted in as Throughout the following generations, the many ways as the number of people who American people have maintained their self- undertake the task. It has survived political righteous belief in the uniqueness of their nation manipulation,historical explanation, and literary and its inhabitants. In the twentieth century, interpretation,and remains an essential element of however, the dream has been secularized.
    [Show full text]
  • The Grotesque in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations 1979 The Grotesque in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates Kathleen Burke Bloom Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Bloom, Kathleen Burke, "The Grotesque in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates" (1979). Master's Theses. 3012. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/3012 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1979 Kathleen Burke Bloom THE GROTESQUE IN THE FICTION OF JOYCE CAROL OATES by Kathleen Burke Bloom A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 1979 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professors Thomas R. Gorman, James E. Rocks, and the late Stanley Clayes for their encouragement and advice. Special thanks go to Professor Bernard P. McElroy for so generously sharing his views on the grotesque, yet remaining open to my own. Without the safe harbors provided by my family, Professor Jean Hitzeman, O.P., and Father John F. Fahey, M.A., S.T.D., this voyage into the contemporary American nightmare would not have been possible.
    [Show full text]
  • Staff Picks – 1960'S Literature
    Staff Picks – 1960’s Literature Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan Adult Fiction An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 364.152 On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas. In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. The Reivers by William Faulkner Adult Fiction This grand misadventure is the story of three unlikely thieves, or reivers: 11-year-old Lucius Priest and two of his family's retainers. In 1905, these three set out from Mississippi for Memphis in a stolen motorcar. The astonishing and complicated results reveal Faulkner as a master of the picaresque. The Magus By John Fowles Adult Fiction The story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching assignment on a remote Greek island. There his friendship with a local millionaire evolves into a deadly game, one in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas must fight for his sanity and his very survival. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez Adult Fiction Telling the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family, this novel chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love.
    [Show full text]
  • Emil Cioran – a Deconstructive Philosophy
    EMIL CIORAN – A DECONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY Angela Botez∗∗∗ [email protected] Abstract: For Cioran, expressing (something, someone) is the same with a postponed ripost or an aggression left for lateron and his writing is a solution, not to act, to avoid a crisis. His indignation is not as much a moral outset, as it is a literary one, the resort of inspiration, while wisdom wearies us of any momentum. The writer is a lunatic who uses in curative purposes these fictions we call words. For the Romanian philosopher the most uncomfortable relation is precisely with philosophy explaining that meeting the idea face to face incites us to talk nonsense, and clouds our judgement and produces the illusion of almightiness... All our deregulations and aberrations are triggered by the fight we lead with the irrealities, with the abstractions, with our will to conquer what does not exist, and from hereon also the impure, tiranical and delirious aspect of the philosophical works... Keywords: Emil Cioran, deconstructivism, antifoundationalism, philosophy of life, despair, and end of philosophy. Among the Romanian philosophers, the most explicit postmodern position of a deconstructive nihilistic type was Emil Cioran. In his work Exercises d’admiration: essais et portraits,1 published in the Romanian version by the Humanitas Publishing House in 1993, there is an article entitled Relecturing, resulted, according to the confession of the author, from the intention to present to the German readers his Précis de décomposition translated from French to German by Paul Celan, in 1953, and edited in 1978. The text gives a glimpse of the type of philosophy promoted by Emil Cioran, inscribed, obviously, among the postmodernist, antifoundationalist, nihilist, and deconstructivist tendencies.
    [Show full text]
  • Dissertation M.C. Cissell December 2016
    ARC OF THE ABSENT AUTHOR: THOMAS PYNCHON’S TRAJECTORY FROM ENTROPY TO GRACE A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English and German Philology In partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of English Philology Matthew Clayton Cissell December 2016 Director: María Felisa López Liquete Co-director: Ángel Chaparro Sainz (c)2017 MATTHEW CLAYTON CISSELL Abstract The central thesis of this dissertation is that Thomas Pynchon has come to occupy a specific position in the field of literature and that this can be seen in his latest novel, Against the Day , in which he is not so much writing about the past or even the present, but about what the present can become, about where it might be driven. Pynchon is self-consciously exploring the politics in the discursive field in which his book is situated, using the fin-de-siècle to highlight the ways that the present is geared toward catastrophe and that people, in a dans macabre , hurl themselves toward that endgame. The theoretical view and methodology behind my analysis of the novel draws to a great extent on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, specifically his sociological literary analysis. This sets an academic precedent in studies of Pynchon’s novels but it also requires applying an approach that has several necessary and onerous steps. In order to see how the social space of the novel is a refracted image of the author’s own social world one must analyse the field of power, after that the literary field and the positions of agents, next the space of possibilities, all of which help one understand the genesis of the author’s habitus and thus his trajectory and the creative project that develops.
    [Show full text]
  • Who Needs Thomas Pynchon? the Role of a Post- Foundational, Reader Response Author Lauren Kersey Regis University
    Regis University ePublications at Regis University All Regis University Theses Spring 2012 Who Needs Thomas Pynchon? the Role of a Post- Foundational, Reader Response Author Lauren Kersey Regis University Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.regis.edu/theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Kersey, Lauren, "Who Needs Thomas Pynchon? the Role of a Post-Foundational, Reader Response Author" (2012). All Regis University Theses. 570. https://epublications.regis.edu/theses/570 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by ePublications at Regis University. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Regis University Theses by an authorized administrator of ePublications at Regis University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WHO NEEDS THOMAS PYNCHON? THE ROLE OF A POST-FOUNDATIONAL, READER RESPONSE AUTHOR A thesis submitted to Regis College The Honors Program In partial fulfillment of the requirements For Graduation with Honors By Lauren Kersey May 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. POST-FOUNDATIONALISM: 6 DEFENDING DOUBT AS OPPOSED TO CERTAINTY III. READER RESPONSE THEORY: 23 EXPOSING INTERPRETATION AS OPPOSED TO MEANING IV. THOMAS PYNCHON: A RECLUSE WITH A SOCIAL IMPACT 37 V. CONCLUSION 77 BIBLIOGRAPHY 85 Preface This thesis provides a survey of post-foundational philosophy and explains reader response theory as one possible application of its insights within the field of literary theory. The main premise which unites these two theories is that belief precedes inference. Before people encounter any element of their world or any literary work, they harbor certain presuppositions that influence how they perceive and interact with that subject.
    [Show full text]
  • Book Chapter Reference
    Book Chapter Alterity MADSEN, Deborah Lea Abstract Thomas Pynchon's engagement with alterity is thematized psychologically through paranoia, schizophrenia, and narcissism; politically through systems of control that attempt to destroy otherness; economically through monopolistic transnational corporations and cartels that supplant national governments; scientifically through determinism and theories of entropy; aesthetically through film and photography, storytelling and the “routinization” of language. Pynchon thematizes these various aspects of culture as the effort to substitute the randomness of nature with a perfectly controlled, and controllable, version of reality: what, in Gravity's Rainbow, Pointsman describes as “a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth.” This chapter considers how Pynchon's work has represented and complicated, by variously undermining and legitimating, contested understandings of identity and alterity. Pynchon's narrative engagement with liberal humanist ideas of essentialized identities gives rise to much of his narratological innovation and complexity, particularly when his exploration of ontological identity categories [...] Reference MADSEN, Deborah Lea. Alterity. In: Dalsgaard, I. ; Herman, L. & McHale, B. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 212 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:92078 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 “Alterity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon,
    [Show full text]
  • Book Reviews, Special Pynchon-Scholarship-In-Languages-Other-Than-English Orbit
    orbit. Review How to Cite: Chetwynd, A, Bugno-Narecka, D, Kipouridou, R, Abe, K, Vanicek, V, Brondino, A and Ryckx, M 2021 Book Reviews, Special Pynchon- Scholarship- in-Languages-Other-than-English Edition, 2020. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 9(1): 1, 1–40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3404 Published: 15 January 2021 Peer Review: Orbit’s book reviews are handled by the reviews editor and do not go through the same blind peer-review process as its scholarly articles. Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Orbit: A Journal of American Literature is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. The Open Library of Humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. Chetwynd, A, et al. 2021 Book Reviews, Special Pynchon-Scholarship-in-Languages-Other-than-English orbit. Edition, 2020. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 9(1): 1, 1–40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3404 REVIEW Book Reviews, Special Pynchon- Scholarship-in-Languages-Other-than- English Edition, 2020 [a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature, please send an email proposing a review to [email protected]] Ali Chetwynd, Dominika Bugno-Narecka, Romina Kipouridou, Kodai Abe, Vit Vanicek, Andrea Brondino and Michel Ryckx Book Reviews, of: Pióro & Paryż (eds) – Thomas Pynchon [Polish] Aliaga (ed) – Thomas Pynchon [Spanish] Nagano –トマス・ピンチョン──帝国、戦争、システム、そして選びに与れぬ 者の生 [Japanese – Thomas Pynchon: Empire, War, System, and the Lives of Preterites] Oleha – Perspektivy Konce: Thomas Pynchon a Americky Román po 11.
    [Show full text]