Thomas Pynchon And The Dark Passages Of History

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 2011 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For David Cowart, Thomas 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. This book 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. -- from Back Cover

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 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 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 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 Against the Day written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 1541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[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.

Download or read book Vineland written by Thomas Pynchon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quite simply, one of those books that will make this world - our world, our daily chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human." - Frank McConnell, Los Angeles Times Book Review “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.”