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Tore Rye Andersen (Aarhus University)
Mapping the World: Pynchon’s Great Global Novel
In April 1964, Thomas Pynchon wrote in a letter to his agent Candida Donadio that he was facing a creative crisis with four novels in progress, which – if they came out on paper anything like they were inside his head – would be “the literary event of the millennium” and would have publishers dueling for the rights to publish them. MORE
Simon de Bourcier (University of East Anglia)
The Æther in Against the Day
This paper examines the meaning and narrative function of the light-bearing Æther in Pynchon’s Against the Day. The paper begins with a very brief history of the concept of the Æther: its transformation from the home of the gods in antiquity to the medium through which light-waves were thought by nineteenth-century physicists to travel; MORE
Gilles Chamerois (University of Brest)
Pynchon, Leone, and Dynamite
Thomas Pynchon’s novels form in a sense one long western, documenting the way power gains control through experimenting with the very spaces of liberty it temporarily allows. Seen in this light, the Zones, Wedges and underground galleries that abound in the novels are so many topological variations on the Frontier. MORE
Ali Chetwynd (University of Michigan)
Inherent Obligation: Ethical Relations and The Demands of Patronage in Recent Pynchon
Many of the papers delivered at International Pynchon Week 2008, including my own on the implications of locatable centres in Gravity’s Rainbow, sought to justify discussion of what might be thought of as a Pynchonian ethics. Ethics is often seen as a matter of fulfilling simultaneous obligations. MORE
Matthew Cissell (University of the Basque Country)
Locating Pynchon in the Literary Field (A Critique of Reviews of Against the Day)
If book reviews are generally meant for the wider public’s consumption, what can the critical reception of Against the Day tell a literary scholar? Drawing on the theory and methodology of Pierre Bourdieu, which views authors and reviewers as agents of cultural production in different sub-fields of a greater social field, this presentation examines the critical reception of Against the Day MORE
Hoop dreams: the soundtrack of Inherent Vice
Larry Sportello punctuates his conversation with snatches of lyrics of popular songs and a running commentary on the 1970 NBA playoffs. What was special about that year’s playoffs? After all, the Lakers had lost a 7-game series to the Celtics in 1969 and had lost in 1968 to the Celtics as well (in 6 games). In fact, by 1970 the Lakers had not won a championship since 1954—when they were still based in Minneapolis. MORE
Nina Engelhardt (University of Edinburgh)
Mathematics, Reality and Fiction in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day explores the drastic and traumatic changes in the traditional worldview in turn-of-the-century Europe, such as occasioned by the First World War, the beginning of modernism, the epistemological crisis, and by broader social and political developments. MORE
Giuseppe Episcopo (University of Edinburgh)
Time Overdrive / Space Override – Pynchon Antinomies
My proposal is focused on approaching the literary plot from the perspective of fractal geometry in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day. The paper will consider the fractal nature of narrative forms of discourse that, juxtaposing non-linear mosaic narrative with time-related sequences, are fixed in a non-Euclidean space, so that the basic coordinates of “Inside”, “Outside”, and “Center”, are far from a stable form. MORE
Martin Paul Eve (University of Sussex)
‘It sure’s hell looked like war’: Terrorism and the Cold War in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Don DeLillo’s Underworld
In his recent examination of Against the Day, Luc Herman finds a ’social relevance’ in what is surely one of the most obvious connections of the text: anarchism and contemporary terrorism. However, through a parallel analysis of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, I would like to demonstrate how this connection runs far deeper MORE
Petrus van Ewijk (University of Antwerp)
The ARPAnet Trip: The Network from Gravity’s Rainbow to Inherent Vice
During his attempt to track down his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay, Larry “Doc” Sportello calls upon the help of a former colleague, the skip-tracer Fritz Drybeam. In Drybeam’s office, Sportello is confronted with “computer cabinets, consoles with lit-up video screens, and alphanumerical keyboards, and cables running all over the floor among unswept drifts of little bug-size rectangles punched out of IBM cards”… MORE
Jola Feix (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich)
Reading Against the Day with the Chums of Chance
In Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon goes on further exploring some of the topics vital to his earlier works: anarchism and political practice; geography, cartography, and information politics; science and mathematics; the distinction between so-called ‘reality’ and fiction; sameness and multiplicity. MORE
Joanna Freer (University of Sussex)
Daylit Fictions and Dark Conjugates: The Political Role of Fantasy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day
When Walt Whitman sang of the “Open Road” in 1856 America was still a seemingly boundless continent. However the frontier was closed by 1890 and as Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw six decades earlier, once “this nomad people” reached the Pacific it “reverse[d] its steps to trouble and destroy the societies which it [had] formed behind it.” MORE
Paweł Frelik (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin)
Always judge a book by its cover – reading Pynchon’s paratexts
Literary theorist Gérard Genette defines “Paratext” as those things in a published work that accompany the text, things such as the author’s name, the title, preface or introduction, illustrations or covers. Genette states: “More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold. [. . .] a zone between text and off-text… MORE
Lovorka Gruic Grmusa (University of Rijeka)
The Symbolism of Light and Darkness in Against the Day
According to archetypal and cross-cultural symbolism, “light” expresses the distinction of creation—the manifested and ordered universe—from the “darkness” of non-distinction or primeval chaos. Thus, light tends to convey a positive affirmation as an image of salvation and creation. MORE
Michael Harris (Central College, Pella, Iowa)
Pynchon and Race: V. Reconsidered
In Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (2008), David Witzling asserts that V. “has too frequently been assumed to be a kind of typological precursor to the later, and presumably greater, Gravity’s Rainbow” (24). MORE
Doug Haynes (University of Sussex)
The Virtues of Vice: ‘Black Humour’ in Inherent Vice and Beyond
Using Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness as a rubric for reading, my paper will investigate how Pynchon’s writing mediates the conflicts of class society.
The paper is part of a book-length project in which I seek to define and socialise the concept of ‘black humour’ in modernist and postmodern writing. MORE
Maximilian Heinrich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Roads Not Taken: Historical Crossroads And Their Potential In Against the Day
My paper aims to show that Pynchon uses Against the Day as a means to refect on how political and economic systems work in reality and affect those who have ascribed to the related sets of beliefs. In order to do that, Pynchon picks a signifcant historical period… MORE
Nick Holdstock (University of Edinburgh)
“Can you tell me, please, where is reality?”: Imagined Utopias in Inherent Vice
Pynchon’s novels contain multiple alternate time lines and realities, often in contradiction of one another. In this paper I argue that what interests Pynchon about such versions of history is not their ‘truth’ or otherwise (which is itself unverifiable) but how they are employed by people to meet different ends… MORE
Tiina Käkelä-Puumala (Institute for Art Research, University of Helsinki)
”There Is Money Everywhere”: Representation, Authority, and the Money Form in Against the Day
Economic questions have always been present in Pynchon’s works, but nowhere more explicitly than in Against the Day, which came out in 2006 —two years before the global financial crisis we are going through at the moment. MORE
Robert J. Lacey (Iona College)
Pynchon on Totalitarianism: Power, Paranoia, and Preterition in Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49
This paper is an exploration of Thomas Pynchon as a theorist of totalitarianism who builds on the insights of Hannah Arendt and anticipates those offered by Vaclav Havel. In his portrayal of organized power in the modern world… MORE
Douglas Lanark (independent scholar)
The Year of the Metal Tiger
As the children of Zwölfkinder could feel when drinking soda water with their head deep inside the fanged mouth of the drinking-fountain beast, the sparkling tiger gave them a thrilled sense of momentary danger parallel to pissing on the Eisenkröte at Putzi’s, the ultimate test of manhood. MORE
Pointsman and the Preterite: On Character and Theology in Gravity’s Rainbow
For all of the discussion of “uncertainty” and “instability” in Gravity’s Rainbow, nearly all critical views of the novel, both friendly and antagonistic, seem to agree on two points: first, that the novel is devoid of traditionally rounded, three-dimensional characters… MORE
Clément Lévy (Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne)
“Back to Gondwanaland!” or, Pynchon’s Myths of Earth
In most of his novels, Thomas Pynchon mentions diverse theories on the planet Earth. Lost continents, the history of the universe or the physical laws that explain it are involved in these hypotheses. Some of them are even litterary myths which were told and retold in different literary genres… MORE
Georgios Maragos (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens)
Moving Images: Light-capturing Technologies, Reality, and the Individual in Thomas Pynchon’s Twentieth Century
In Against the Day, an ingenious contraption is able to glance at the past, present, and future of a person just by analyzing a photograph. In Vineland a movie camera is considered a weapon, but fails, in a particularly pynchonesque manner, to become useful in the hands of those who tried to oppose the system. MORE
Arkadiusz Misztal (Gdańsk University)
Varied Modes of Detection: a Forensic Investigation into Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice
The presentation will offer a brief analytical and comparative study of two Pynchon’s novels emblematic of the American Sixties, Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice. While acknowledging the social and political dimension of the two texts, my presentation will focus on the problem of detecatbility… MORE
Seán Molloy (University of Edinburgh)
Between and Beyond Bakunin and Nietzsche: Thomas Pynchon and the Politics of Transcendence
The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of Pynchon’s politics by reference to the influences of Mikhail Bakunin and Friedrich Nietzsche upon his conceptualization of both the human condition and the future of humanity. Pynchon does not refer to either author explicitly in his work… MORE
Matthias Mosch (Durham University)
Faust and the Faustian in Gravity’s Rainbow
Faustian man has long become the epitome of Western civilization and its drive to transcend boundaries, be they natural or ethical. As Gravity’s Rainbow thrives on this theme, it takes no wonder that the number of literary Faust versions featured in it is legion, reaching from the sixteenth century chapbook to Goethe… MORE
Richard J Moss (Durham University)
Ernst Bloch‘s European Reichs in Pynchon’s Imagined Europe
In Ernst Bloch’s essay On the Origins of the Third Reich, he explores the European concept of the ‘Reich’, and how the term has a long tradition of revolution in the psyche of European history. As Bloch writes, “in its original form the Third Reich has denoted the social-revolutionary ideal dream… MORE
Keith O’Neill (SUNY, Dutchess)
Inherent Vice’s Monster Mash: Pynchon and the Gothic
Late in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Doc Sportello takes in the Saturday horror movie, “Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), hosted by subcultural superstar Larry Vincent, aka ‘Seymour,’ who liked to address his population of faithful viewers as ‘fringees’… MORE
Sascha Pöhlmann (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Pynchon’s Games
This paper analyzes a pervasive trope in all of Pynchon’s novels that has been unduly neglected by criticism so far: the game. I argue that Pynchon’s use of games, which come in numerous different forms in his novels, can be read as a self-reflexive comment on his fiction, if not fiction in general. MORE
Xavier Marcó del Pont (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Paranoid Reading: Narrative Structure and Organisational Devices in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Inherent Vice
As Samuel Cohen states, ‘Pynchon’s big novels have all had central geometric figures, which are even referred to in their titles: V. (1963) has the chevron, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) has a parabola, and Mason & Dixon (1997) has the line.’ MORE
Terry Reilly (University of Alaska, Fairbanks)
Hans Kammler and Gravity’s Rainbow: Or, The Kammlerstab Takes a Road Trip
Pynchon’s interest in relationships between hard science and the paranormal often includes allusions to, or representations of, real or fictitious weapons systems, from the V-2 in Gravity’s Rainbow to the Kenucky long rifles in Mason & Dixon, to Tesla’s death ray in Against the Day. MORE
Michel Ryckx
Abundancy and Dialogue in Pynchon Criticism: A Possible Model for a Computed Secondary Bibliography
1. Abundancy
The first article on Pynchon’s work in an academical journal was published the same year V. was hailed by most reviewers in the popular press as an extraordinary first novel (1). Today the Tenth International Pynchon Week is organised. MORE
Jeffrey Severs (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
“The abstractions she was instructed to embody”: Women and Capitalism in Against the Day
When Oedipa Maas speculates in the first paragraph of The Crying of Lot 49 that Pierce Inverarity’s “whitewashed bust” of Jay Gould might have fallen from a shelf and killed him, Pynchon begins for his protaganist a lesson in capitalist “ikon[s],” a debunking of their whitewashed history. MORE
Jesse E. Sherwood (SUNY, Fredonia)
Pynchon’s Wild West: The American Myth in Against the Day and Other Works
Pynchon, in his brief review of the Western novel Warlock, by Oakley Hall stated: “Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang… MORE
Paolo Simonetti (Università di Roma “Sapienza”)
“Bye bye Black Dahlia”: Thomas Pynchon and the Inherent Vice of detective fiction
In his 1984 influential work Stefano Tani, defining anti-detective fiction, realized that “to choose not to choose is the widest choice the anti-detective can make, because to let the mystery exist does not restrict his freedom to a single choice and, at the same time, potentially implies all solutions without choosing any” MORE
Michael Sinding (University of Giessen)
Framing Monsters: Pynchon’s Multiple and Mixed Genres
I would like to examine studies of the genre of Gravity’s Rainbow to develop aspects of a cognitive view of genre. Specifically, I want to show how a cognitive view of categorization helps clarify how texts can participate in multiple genres and can mix several genres. MORE
Paweł Stachura (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Literary Spaces in Pynchon, Strugatskie, and Dukaj
The paper discusses representation of space based on imaginary numbers, quaternions, and Riemann’s axioms in geometry; this is the setting of Pynchon’s Against the Day. The paper will also present the (possibly negative) outcomes of the current attempt to find a mathematical structure… MORE
Gary Thompson (Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan)
Performing Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon’s novels can serve to test the possibilties of using performance theory in literary studies. As postmodernist fiction, Pynchon’s writing places its own status in question, leading to a greater self-consciousness about the act of reading and the permeability of boundaries… MORE
Birger Vanwesenbeeck (SUNY, Fredonia)
The Crying of Lot 49 and the Politics of Mourning
The question of mourning has long constituted a central but, until recently, relatively little studied aspect of Pynchon’s fiction.1 From the “great death” that haunts the character Nathan “Lardass” Levine in Pynchon’s first published story “The Small Rain” (Slow Learner 50) to the “Hyperthrenia” or “Excess of Mourning”… MORE
Dara Waldron (Limerick Institute of Technology)
Thanatoids and Death by Television: Politics and/of the Spectacle in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
Returning to an all American setting for his long awaited comeback political novel Vineland, Thomas Pynchon encountered an ambivalent response. Far too engaged with the present to warrant a ‘critical’ re-imagination of the future, the novel was said to envisage 80s America… MORE
Celia Wallhead (Univeristy Of Granada)
THE INELUDIBLE FLAWS IN HIPPIEDOM AND FASCISM IN THOMAS PYNCHONS’ INHERENT VICE
Jeff T. Johnson focuses (if that is the right word) on the haze, mist, fog, that pervades sixties California in Pynchon’s portrayal: “This time around, Pynchon’s narrative frame is a look back at something peering forward out of the haze, an intoxicating cloud of unknowing. MORE
Huei-ju Wang (National Chi Nan University)
The Figure of the Private Eye in Pynchon from The Crying of Lot 49 to Inherent Vice
The arrival in August 2009 of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, makes clear the centrality of the figure of the private eye in his long-standing and persistent interest in uncovering and agitating repressed, forgotten or contending social history and labor history across the Atlantic in his work. MORE