Dissertation--Literatur--Rostock--Universität, 2005.

Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D. / Bibliogr. p. 141-151.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Department of English, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-265).

Thesis (M.A. 1980) from the Department of English, University of Adelaide, 1980.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-37).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-330).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 331-337).

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2007. Dept. of English. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [115-116]).

Outre leur caractère encyclopédique, les récits de Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. empruntant le mode de la quête, la vérité et sa trouvaille s’en trouvent explicitement au fondement. La vérité est cependant aussi centrale que structurellement absente, hors-récit, relevant plutôt de la condition même d’existence du récit, se confondant presque avec la possibilité de dire, la fonction de nomination : vaut pour vérité le fait que le dit se tienne de lui-même. La connaissance, elle, choit ce faisant du côté de l’inconscient, là où le sujet s’abîme dans cette vérité extérieure à lui qu’est la garantie que son être puisse se soutenir de son dire, là où le sujet se trouve donc sans le savoir. Cet extérieur au sujet se conjoint fondamentalement avec son corps : toute parole en effet se situe à la frontière où la chair tombe sous le coup du symbolique et c’est le corps, celui de la filiation, de la reproduction, du social, qui agite le discours, celui-ci n’ayant d’autre fonction que de le retranscrire. La connaissance se dessine ainsi comme visant toujours, à travers les objets prélevés dans le réel, un corps en reste du symbolique. Ce partage du corps et du discours est cause du hiatus entre la vérité et la connaissance, la matière et l’identité, tel que plus le protagoniste, cet autre sans corps, en apprend, à son propre sujet pour commencer, moins il s’y reconnaît, en une forme de perpétuel manquement à soi-même – et n’est-ce pas, de la même façon, afin de se divertir, de se changer les idées qu’un lecteur cueille un livre, pour finalement s’apercevoir s’y être retrouvé, ou inversement s’il avait justement commencé par vouloir s’y chercher ? / Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.’s narratives, beside their encyclopedic nature, use the quest mode and therefore truth and its revelation explicitly lie at their foundation. Yet truth is as central as it is structurally absent, outside of the narrative, more coming under the condition of existence of the narrative itself, almost coinciding with the possibility of saying, the nomination function: passes for truth the fact that the word holds all by itself. Knowledge, on its part, falls on the unconscious side, where the subject sinks in this truth external to him, which is the guarantee that his being can be supported by his saying, where the subject thus finds himself without knowing it. This dimension outside of the subject fundamentally conjoins with his body: every word indeed is situated on the border where the flesh falls within the symbolic, and it is the body, that of filiation, of reproduction, of the social, which moves the discourse, the latter having no other function than to transcribe it. Thus knowledge appears as always aiming, through objects extracted from the real, at a body remaining partly outside of the symbolic. This sharing between body and discourse causes the hiatus between truth and knowledge, matter and identity. Thus the more the protagonist, this other without a body, learns about himself to begin with, the less he recognizes himself, in a form of perpetual misidentification – and in the same way, doesn’t the reader pick a book in order to divert himself, to get a break, only to realize in the end that he found elements of himself in it, or conversely if he precisely intended in the first place to look for himself?

This dissertation is concerned with the works written by the American novelist Thomas Pynchon while he was in his twenties. As such it deals with some of the short stories he produced as a student at Cornell, and with his first two novels, <i>V.</i> and <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>. It excludes his longest and probably greatest novel, <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>, partly because the earlier work deserves more attention than it has received, partly because it is difficult to confine a discussion of a text of such size and complexity to a single chapter. The Introduction is an exposition of the method of the dissertation, which draws on a distinction between the 'first story' or narrative level of the texts, and the 'second story', a latent structure concealed beneath the surface. Motives, techniques and problems involved in the construction of such latent structures are discussed, and brief examples are given. Ch. 1 is a close reading of three short stories, rather than a comprehensive account of Pynchon's career as a short story writer. It considers in turn <i>Mortality and Mercy in Vienna</i>, <i>Low-lands</i> and <i>Entropy</i>, all three set in Washington or New York in the late 1950s. In each case analysis reveals levels of meaning - artistic, political, psychological - which the anecdotal and apparently casual quality of the writing would not lead one to suspect. Ch. 2, devoted to <i>V.</i>, is concerned entirely with eliciting information from the subtext of the novel on the position it assigns to itself in literary tradition. The chapter consists of two sections, the first listing the more obvious allusions to 20th century literature in the foreign half of <i>V.</i>; the second inferring a critique of Modernism from these allusions. Ch. 3 opens with a reading of the 'first story' of <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i> which detects subtle indications in the text of negligence on the part of the heroine, Oedipa Maas. This reading then becomes the basis of an analysis of the 'second story' which suggests a concordance between the text's implicit conception of literary history and its political vision.