Thomas Pynchon

Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd, Gilles Chamerois

• Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9782367814070
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Bibliographic informations
• First pages
• Table of contents
• Liminaires
• Introduction
• Pynchon’s Indicative Naming: Onomatomania? Onomatophobia? Or, None of the Above?
• California Traverses: Lines of Resistance in Pynchon’s Vineland and Against the Day
• Virtual Structures and Virtuality in The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice
• Pynchon and Wittgenstein: Ethics, Relativism and Philosophical Methodology
• The Spectre of Faust in the Early Works of Thomas Pynchon
• V. as Archive
• Noise and Parasitism in Thomas Pynchon’s V
• Storyworld and Historiographic Metafiction: Belgium in Against the Day
• Portraits of the Artist as an Undergraduate Prankster: Images of Youth in Pynchon’s Writing
• The Artist as Scavenger: Inconclusiveness and Reflexivity in “Low-Lands”
• Langue-en-joue: Bilingual Jokes in Mason & Dixon
• “A Beat Late”—Rhythmical Oddities in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
• “Between Hell and Purgatory”: From Baudelaire’s Allegory of Commodified Female to Pynchon’s Neobaroque in V
• Feeling God on Certain Days: The Kenosis of The Crying of Lot 49 after the Death of God
• Approaching Presence in Thomas Pynchon’s Novels
• Bibliography
• Contributors