Against the grain : reading Pynchon's counternarratives / / edited by Sascha Pöhlmann.

• Superior document: Dialogue ; 8
• TeilnehmendeR: Pöhlmann, Sascha.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Dialogue (Rodopi (Firm)) ; 8.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (373 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives is the first book that critically addresses Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day , published in 2006. The nineteen essays collected in this volume employ a large variety of approaches to this massive novel and also take it as an opportunity to reevaluate Pynchon’s earlier works, analyzing Against the Day in relation to V. , The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravity’s Rainbow , Vineland , Mason andamp; Dixon , and Pynchon’s short stories and essays. The authors—younger as well as established scholars from eleven countries—address these works with regard to issues of modernism and postmodernism, politics, popular culture, concepts of space and time, visuality, sexuality, identity, media and communication, philosophy, religion, American and global (literary) history, physics, mathematics, economics, and many more. Their insights are as profound as they are diverse, and all provide fresh views on Pynchon’s fiction that will be useful, fascinating and entertaining for researchers and fans alike.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- The Complex Text / Sascha Pöhlmann -- Setting Sail Against the Day: The Narrative World of Thomas Pynchon / Heinz Ickstadt -- Against the Master: Pynchon’s Wellsian Art / Keith O’Neill -- Travels in the Fourth Dimension in Against the Day / Simon de Bourcier -- “Perchance to Dream”: Clock Time and Creative Resistance Against the Day / Inger H. Dalsgaard -- “When You Come to a Fork in the Road”—Marcuse, Intellectual Subversion and Negative Thought in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day / Toon Staes -- Imperfect Circles: Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Rim to the Centre in Gravity’s Rainbow / Ali Chetwynd -- Still Moving Against the Day: Pynchon’s Graphic Impulse / Rodney Taveira -- As Far as Pynchon “Loves Cameras” / Clément Lévy -- A Medium No Longer: How Communication and Information Become Objectives in Thomas Pynchon’s Works / Georgios Maragos -- “It’s My Job, I Can’t Back Out”: The “House” and Coercive Property Relations in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland / William D. Clarke -- The Tao of Thomas Pynchon / Michael Harris -- “The Real and Only Fucking is Done on Paper”: Penetrative Readings and Pynchon’s Sexual Text / Jessica Lawson -- Fluid Destiny: Memory and Signs in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 / Manlio Della Marca -- The Underworld and Its Forces: Croatia, the Uskoks and Their Fight for Autonomy in Against the Day / Lovorka Gruić Grmuša -- Kit and Kim: Espionage in Against the Day / Celia Wallhead -- “Particle or Wave?”: The “Function” of the Prairie in Against the Day / Leyla Haferkamp -- From Science to Terrorism: The Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day / Francisco Collado-Rodríguez -- “Vectors and [Eigen]Values”: The Mathematics of Movement in Against the Day / Hanjo Berressem -- Contributors -- Index.