Review of Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon

Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2021

Studies in the Novel 45.4 (Winter 2013): 709-711

2013

This PhD thesis focuses on the relations between literary poetics, theories of reading, and the interpretive criticism of an author's work. My approach to this field is through the abundant scholarly writings on the American author Thomas Pynchon, and, in particular, academic readings of his novels. I am trying to study the protocols of reading involved in literary study by mapping out the space between the individual and often idiosyncratic scholarly interpretations and the theories of literary poetics. To this end, poetics is reframed in this work as a theory of reading. In this I am taking my cue from Jonathan Culler, literary phenomenology, and Reader-Response critics. Thus understood, poetics studies those processes of perception, understanding and cognition that underlie textual interpretation and analysis. Within this orientation, the questions of poetics closely resemble those that are today posed in cognitive literary studies, the empirical studies of reading, and postclassical narratology. The present study rereads the theory of poetics and shows that many devices and textual strategies it describes can be usefully understood as procedures of reading. This is done by looking at the analytical choices made in readings of Pynchon and describing them in terms of reader-oriented poetics. This method zones in on the empirical observation made by many Pynchon scholars. While we generally consider the author’s thematic scope as singularly eclectic as his repertoire of literary means, time and time again we seem to reach the same conclusions: the same themes emerge as crucial, the same devices are regarded as significant, and the same passages from the novels are cited because of their capability to encapsulate something of the elusive whole. But what makes certain themes more or less central? How do some of Pynchon’s structural experiments become so decisive in determining what the novels mean or what they are about? Why are certain key passages so crucial to interpreting the novels? In answering these questions, the study toes the line between conventions of reading and the cognitive processing of texts. It is discovered that the procedures of reading identified as structural metaphor, miniature analogy, and thematization straddle the heuristic divide. These procedures are, on one hand, institutional and cultural, in how they appeal to convention and tradition. Yet, on the other hand, they contain a component that can be only described as cognitive or perceptual. The latter part of the study focuses more firmly on Pynchon’s debut novel V. (1963) and its scholarly readings. The theoretical interest in the protocols and procedures of reading is employed as a method for reading the novel and studying how it has been read. As literary scholar Robert Scholes has written, our protocols of reading will yield to methodization only up to a point. This study approaches that point through terrain on which the reading procedures of literary scholarship are entangled with the more general processes of cognition, perception, and interpretation.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon

English Studies from Archives to Prospects: Volume 1 - Literature and Cultural Studies, S. Grgas, T. Klepač and M. Domines Veliki (eds.), Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016

Paradigmatic of a frustratingly ever more complex and ever less accountable world of the early twenty-first century, both American literature and its corresponding, ever-growing bulk of literary criticism and/or cultural theory seem to have arrived at the point where the quantitative immensity of available information/production, instead of quenching the proverbial thirst for knowledge, too frequently causes nausea and metaphorical hangover. This statement, often heard and reiterated in academic as well as non-academic contexts, is sometimes used by the detractors of postmodernist literature, postmodernist literary criticism and postmodernist cultural theory as a welcome argument in their attempts to prove postmodernism's obscurantism rooted in neoliberalism and political reactionarism that allegedly hinders any effective and meaningful social or political critique, and, ultimately, any form of activism. Thomas Pynchon's work certainly represents an overwhelming illustration of the postmodernist excess. The paper examines whether Pynchon's narrative and thematic complexity (e.g. in Gravity's Rainbow), including the problematization of history, multiplicity of potential meanings of events and phenomena, the triumph of systems and of the inanimate, merely reflects the world's complexity in the sense that reflecting equals justifying or even relishing in its obscurity, or whether Pynchon's literary assessment of Western culture's condition might point at the possibility of challenge in some form, in line with Tom LeClair who, in The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (1989), classifies Pynchon as American postmodern naturalist for his successful representation and comprehension of the hegemonic master systems, suggesting that comprehending the forces that shape our world might mean saving it.

Dissertations of the Third Cycle on Thomas Pynchon.

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon, 2012

With this volume Professor David Cowart becomes the first scholar to have published two book-length studies on the work of Thomas Pynchon, which is no small feat. Cowart thus returns to the subject of his very first monograph, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, published in 1980 (an annus mirabilis for Pynchon criticism, which also saw the publication of studies by Douglas Fowler, Douglas Mackey, and John O. Stark). Although he requires no introduction, it is worth mentioning that David Cowart is Louise Fry Scudder Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. He has published books on subjects that range from history and the contemporary novel, literary symbiosis, and immigrant fiction, to the work of John Gardner, and that of Don Delillo.