Master of Arts / Department of English / Timothy A. Dayton / This thesis project seeks to reconcile the literary criticism of Marxist critic and advocate of literary realism Georg Lukács with the writing of postmodern author Thomas Pynchon in order to validate the continued relevance of Lukácsian aesthetics. Chapter 1 argues that Lukács’ The Historical Novel is not only a valid lens with which to analyze Pynchon’s own historical novel, Mason & Dixon, but that such analysis will yield valuable insight. Chapter 2 illustrates the aesthetic transition from the historical drama to the historical novel by using Lukács’ ideas to explicate The Courier’s Tragedy, a historical drama found within the pages of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Chapter 3 applies Lukács’ ideas on the “world-historical” figure and the “mediocre” hero of the classic historical novel to Mason & Dixon. Chapter 4 asserts that Mason & Dixon enables contemporary readers to experience the novel as what Lukács calls a “prehistory” to the present. This chapter also illustrates how the prehistory of Mason & Dixon anticipates Pynchon’s nonfiction essay “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” Finally, this chapter demonstrates how Pynchon avoids the pitfall of modernization in Mason & Dixon, which Lukács defines as the dressing up of contemporary crises and psychology in a historical setting. Chapter 5 ties together the work of the previous four chapters and offers conclusions on both what Pynchon teaches us about Lukács, as well as what Lukács helps us to learn about Pynchon.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T23:17:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo9337_1.pdf: 566218 bytes, checksum: 713ea196948792e57ec4251dac347b2f (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1999 / Este texto analisa a Concepção do Serviço Social como Processo de Trabalho. Contém uma investigação sobre as categorias do trabalho e da ideologia no pensamento de Georg Lukács, como posições teleológicas integrantes da práxis humana que apresentam diferenças qualitativas entre si. A partir dessas categorias problematiza a relação entre trabalho e Serviço Social e entre Serviço Social e ideologia, tendo em vista que, a Concepção do Serviço Social como Processo de Trabalho toma por objeto da prática profissional a Questão Social enquanto expressão dos conflitos socialmente existentes. Pela exposição do trabalho e da ideologia o texto procura mostrar que a práxis humana é um complexo de complexos, no qual o trabalho articula a relação homem x natureza e a ideologia é mediação nos conflitos humanos. Nessa dimensão discute, em termos ontológicos, a imprecisão teórica na Concepção do Serviço Social como Processo de Trabalho