No description available.

This paper is an investigation into the way that paranoia is represented in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow. Using various definitions of paranoia which are given in the text itself, I outline how each definition is demonstrated, both in narrative events and in the structural principles of the text. As well, I show how each definition may lend a different perspective on the reading process itself, thus implicating the Pynchon's reader in the paranoid dynamic which Gravity's Rainbow depicts. In effect, I attempt to return the pluralism to Pynchon's definition of paranoia.

This study of Gravity's Rainbow replies to critics who have misread Thomas Pynchon's novel, and defines the novel's focal concept. In Gravity's Rainbow, style, structure, and concept are integrated in the author’s design. The fulfillment of this design results in a comprehensive representation of the apocalyptic temper of western civilization in the modern period—the consciousness that has caused the armageddon of World War II and the threat of nuclear war. A meaningful term for this apocalypse is “parousia”, an end to history taking the form of a general surrender to deathliness. A beneficial way of defining “parousia” is through a certain ideological social stratification. Characters in the novel can be categorized as the Elect, the Preterite, or the Redeemer. Ethical struggles between these classes result in an on-going historical process toward an apocalypse.This paper organizes Pynchon’s apocalyptic concept into a centrifugal axis where meaning is organically interrelated and then spirals outward toward varied novelistic developments which offer other perspectives on the same basic concepts. The thesis explicates approximately thirty episodes which substantiate the “parousia” concept as it appears in the author’s style, structure, and thematic ideology.

No description available.

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.

No description available.

Any text which criticizes, undermines and/or transforms the encyclopaedic ideal of ordering and textualizing the world in a closed, linear fashion can be defined as a post-encyclopaedic text. This thesis explores both theoretical and artistic texts which inhabit the realm of post-encyclopaedism. In the past, critical speculation on encyclopaedism in literature has been concerned with the ways in which artistic texts attempt to live up to the encyclopaedic ideal. In some cases, this effort to establish an identity between the artistic text and the encyclopaedia has led to an ignorance of the disruptive or even deconstructive effects of so-called fictional encyclopaedias. Once we recognize the existence of such effects, we must begin to examine the techniques and possibilities of post-encyclopaedism. Hence we can see post-encyclopaedic qualities in the condensed meta-encyclopaedism of Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the disrupted quests for encyclopaedic revelation in Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and the principle of textualized world as fugue in Louis Zukofsky's "A"-12. In addition, we can create a theoretical space for the post-encyclopaedic text by weaving together Mikhail Bakhtin'sideas on the novel as opposed to the epic, Michel Foucault's notion of restructuring the closed circle of the text through mirrored writing, Jurij Lotman's theory of internal and external recoding in texts, and Umberto Eco's concept of the open text. By combining an investigation of theoretical and artistic texts which lend themselves to post-encyclopaedism, we can create a generic distinction between texts which attempt to be encyclopaedic in themselves: and texts which disrupt and/or transform the encyclopaedic ideal / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate