Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture

Joanna Freer

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107076051
• eBook ISBN: 9781316057377
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 On the Road to Anti-Structure
• Chapter 2 Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion in Gravity’s Rainbow
• Chapter 3 The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism in The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day
• Chapter 4 The Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Suicide, and Gravity’s Rainbow
• Chapter 5 Feminism Moderate and Radical in The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland
• Conclusion A “Little Parenthesis of Light” Pynchon’s Counterculture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index