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This thesis approaches Thomas Pynchon's novel, Mason & Dixon, in terms of its narrative structure and sentimental content. Pynchon is generally regarded as a challenging and innovative writer, so narrative is an unsurprising subject for a study of his most recent work; sentimentalism, on the other hand, is a far cry from traditional approaches to his writing. Despite this, however, as I outline in my introduction, sentimentalism has long hovered around the edges of Pynchon's work. In Mason & Dixon it takes a privileged role as the dominating mood of the novel's final section, "Last Transit." This sentimentalism, far from being the retrogressive move that the term might imply, is bound up in a radically reconceived approach to the narrating voice of novelistic discourse, whence comes the unifying feature of my study. In Mason & Dixon, I identify this unity in the novel's referencing of film, long-established as one of Pynchon's major cultural influences. In my first chapter, I outline my approach to sentimentalism and narrative-in the modern and, specifically, modernist novel, as well as in contemporary film. In chapter two I outline my conception of Mason & Dixon's narrator as emulating film's visual representations; in chapter three, I explore this narrator as a "radically underdetermined" identity, who represents, not a linguistically embodied subjectivity, but rather representation as its own agent, as representation itself. In my fourth and final chapter, I examine how this narrator manages the sentimental content of the novel, concentrating on the character of Mason.

This thesis investigates the relationship between the apocalyptic narrative and the postmodern novel. It explores and builds on Patricia Waugh‟s hypothesis in Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism (1992) which suggests that that the postmodern is characterised by an apocalyptic sense of crisis, and argues that there is in fact a strong relationship between the apocalyptic and the postmodern. It does so through an exploration of apocalyptic narratives and themes in five postmodern novels. It also draws on additional supporting material which includes literary and cultural theory and criticism, as well as historical theory. In using the novel as a medium through which to explore apocalyptic narratives, this thesis both assumes and affirms the novel‟s importance as a cultural artefact which reflects the concerns of the age in which it is written. I suggest that each of the novels discussed in this thesis demonstrates the close relationship between the apocalyptic and the postmodern through society‟s concern over the direction of history, the validity of meta-narratives, and other cultural phenomenon, such as war, the development of nuclear weaponry, and terrorism. Although the scope of this thesis is largely confined to the historical-cultural epoch known as postmodernity, it also draws on literature and cultural criticism from earlier periods so as to provide a more comprehensive framework for investigating apocalyptic ideas and their importance inside the postmodern novel. A number of modernist writers are therefore referred to or quoted throughout this thesis, as are other important thinkers from preceding periods whose ideas are especially pertinent. The present thesis was researched and written between March 2010 and August 2011 and is dedicated to all of those people who lost their lives in the apocalyptic events of the February 22nd Christchurch earthquake.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, details Oedipa Maas’ quest to unearth a possibly centuries-old clandestine mail system, the Trystero. Oedipa is immersed in notions of sociality and she must navigate the social landscape, searching for clues as to the existence of the social system. In her quest she assumes the role of a detective who searches for meaning, as she looks for clues and questions others who might potentially be privy to the secrets of the Trystero. She necessarily performs the process of symbolic exchange with those she encounters in an attempt at ascertaining some greater meaning within the world that she thinks might lie behind the Trystero. In this, the nature of the circulation of meaning is revealed as a cultural construct.

This thesis uses the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983, trans. 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985, trans. 1989) as a methodology for examining the subject of film in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The first half of the thesis provides a review of the literature on the subject of film in Gravity's Rainbow, as well as a review of current scholarship on Deleuze's Cinema books, before providing a close reading of both Cinema books that summarizes and explicates the elaborate taxonomy of cinematic signs and images developed by Deleuze. The second half of the thesis uses Deleuze's cinematic taxonomy to analyze examples of time-images and movement-images in Gravity's Rainbow. The thesis concludes by connecting the work of Pynchon's novel to the work of Deleuze's study in a discussion of how film participates in the emergence of a new concept of history during the postwar period.

Thesis (PhD.) --University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in a print form.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Edinburgh, 2001.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-123). Also available via the World Wide Web.

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