Thomas Pynchon has often been hailed, by those at wont to make such statements, as the most significant American author of the past half-century. What is indisputable about this simultaneously beguiling and frustrating, prodigiously sophisticated and irrevocably juvenile, not to say admired and reviled writer, is that his fiction has inspired critical readings that are now as appositely voluminous as his novels themselves. Yet no prior critical effort does full justice to the importance of the face in the work of this notoriously “faceless” author, who even had a brown paper bag over his head when depicted in cartoon form on The Simpsons. In light of this oversight, this thesis seeks to address what might be called—to borrow from his 1990 novel, Vineland—the ‘not-yet-come-to-terms-with face' in Pynchon's corpus. Though always driven by the workings of Pynchon's writing, various theorists—such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erving Goffman, and Emmanuel Levinas—are called-upon throughout this study in order to aid the conceptualisation of this ‘not-yet-come-to-terms with face'. Particular inspiration is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's call to ‘dismantle the face' in A Thousand Plateaus. Albeit not in strict adherence to this summons, the first three chapters of this project butcher the face into its dominant component features: eyes, nose, and mouth. These features—as well as the central issues of the final two chapters, the mask and the face respectively—are then traced across Pynchon's entire oeuvre, including his most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, published when this project was already underway. What emerges is a picture of the integral role the face plays in Pynchon's manifold concerns: surveillance, surgery, dentistry, identity, cinema, drugs, the senses, and so on. This thesis ultimately contends that although frequently defaced and effaced in Pynchon's writing, the face is nevertheless a prime locus at which ethical and political possibility surface.

This thesis examines the countercultural politics expressed within the work of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, contributing to critical work already published on the subject of Pynchon's politics, in which there has been a recent upsurge of interest. Expressions of sympathy with anarchist and anti-Capitalist principles discerned in Pynchon's work are explored in their connection with the author's experience of particular practices and philosophies of the 1960s counterculture. Furthermore, the ongoing significance of sixties politics in Pynchon's more recent production is demonstrated as ideological connections between earlier and later novels are traced. In Slow Learner Pynchon professed admiration for the motive energy of Beat literature, so influential on the formation of the counterculture. With particular focus on Jack Kerouac's On the Road, chapter one demonstrates the impact of the Beat movement, and its limits, in Pynchon's early novels. New Left thought and tactics as manifested across the decade provide the focus of the second chapter, which engages primarily with Gravity's Rainbow's depiction of Communist revolutionaries in Weimar-era Germany. The following chapter considers the role of psychedelic experience and the philosophies of Timothy Leary in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day, arguing that the fantastical has a concrete political role in Pynchon's novels. Black Power, and specifically the political theory of the Black Panther Party, is the subject of chapter four. Gravity's Rainbow's framing of Huey P. Newton's concept of “revolutionary suicide” is central to an analysis which offers insights into the novel's perspectives on the use of violence and on leadership in revolutionary groups. The final chapter investigates the dynamics of Pynchon's ambivalent engagement with the Women's Movement. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is put forward as an important intertext for The Crying of Lot 49, while Vineland is examined in the context of radical feminism.

My thesis centers on Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 and the ways in which both novels defamiliarize our world and ways of thinking. Both novels use formal literary techniques as a way of making ordinary cultural artifacts, situations, and environments seem unfamiliar from our every day perceptions. This process of defamiliarizing the regular and everyday has the greater implications of estranging universal themes such as love, environment, and belonging. Both novels also question our precarious hold on corporeal reality by interpreting plot through two outside narrators whose trustworthiness is constantly placed into question. Unsurprisingly, Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49 unsettle the categories of truthfulness and reinvention in interpreting America's immediate cultural and environmental landscape. Both texts blur the distinction between recorded and imaginatively reconstructed worlds: just so, America has isolated our two narrators in the text from their immediate landscape. Interpretations of America are questioned in the thesis through the process of Shklovsky's theory of Defamiliarization interfaced with Freud's Uncanny in the novel. Language disobedience and discord also play a part and will be discussed through Bakhtin's theories on polyphonic language.

No description available.

No description available.

My dissertation, "A Proper Secularism: Beyond Ideology in Bulgakov, Trilling, Updike and Pynchon," explores the ways in which the literary imagination pushes beyond ideology, and points towards notions of the eternal, by attunement and fidelity to the material. In the terms of Rowan Williams, "if a proper secularism requires faith; if it is to guarantee freedom, this is because a civilized politics must be a politics attuned to the real capacities and dignities of the person." It is the argument of this thesis that the literary imagination, when operating with integrity, mirrors this understanding of the properly secular. A proper secularism is thus defined as both an insistence upon accurate portrayal of the material world in all its variety and difference and, concomitantly, as an honest "holding together" of that difference that can provide an approach to the eternal. It is my contention that four novels, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling; Roger's Version by John Updike; and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, each embody and rely upon this understanding of the secular. In so doing, each book pushes beyond the ideology of a century of war and violent imposition. Bulgakov's novel was composed in the heart of Communist Russia; Trilling's novel deals with the lives and ideological biases of Communist sympathizers in America; Pynchon writes from America but about London as it copes with the unitary, impositional ideology of death as signified by the German V-2 rocket in World War II; John Updike, though not overtly concerned with the Cold War in Roger's Version, nonetheless explores the machinery of war in the computer and its language. It is the argument of this dissertation that these novels constitute an answer to the violence of impositional ideology, a counter-arc to the path of the rocket, gravity's impositional rainbow.

This paper examines how the protagonist of Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, seeks subjective fixity in the historical and postmodern sublime. Using an approach that draws upon the theories of Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the essay argues that while Slothrop indulges his own paranoia and commits acts of increasing perversion to assert self, these attempts actually blur the lines of identity instead of presenting an autonomous being.

This doctoral thesis examines literary representations of the Holocaust by Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster, and maps the relation between memory and narrative elicited from literature onto American museums, memorials and monuments. This research argues that the ramifications of the trauma originally felt by Holocaust witnesses resonate in the American collective memory, and its literary and architectural forms, that seeks to remember on behalf of those witnesses. The consequent traumatic disruption of literary and architectural narratives can be identified, using various appropriated psychoanalytical concepts, and Holocaust memory traced as it eludes, and irrupts in, the cultural forms that try to remember it. Establishing the dynamics of collective memory allows the cultural significance of Holocaust remembrance to be investigated, especially in relation to the memories and ethnic identities of survivors that are subsumed by an Americanised version of the past. By way of a conclusion, although this thesis points to the problematisation of historical representation, it also challenges notions of the Holocaust's unrepresentability common to much postmodern thought. It searches for a methodology of memorialisation or at least identifies where blocks to mourning could be removed from the American cultural landscape.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・論文博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 乙第13348号 / 論人博第53号 / 新制||人||226(附属図書館) / 2019||論人博||53(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 尚之, 教授 廣野 由美子, 准教授 小島 基洋, 教授 波戸岡 景太 / 学位規則第4条第2項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

No description available.