...Donald Weber Copyright © 1984 by Duke University Press 1984 West, Pynchon, Mailer, and the Jeremiad Tradition Donald Weber If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world...

...Douglas Fowler Copyright © 1980 by Duke University Press 1980 Pynchon s Magic World Douglas Fowler Critics and literary theorists trying to place Thomas Pynchon would be wise to borrow the first precept of an even older profession: First, do no harm. I suspect that this investigation...

... Celine, Conversations with Professor Y ^Conventional American criticism tends to label Thomas Pynchon s Gravity s Rainbow a novel of postmodern fantasy that breaks free from reality in order to comment on it, as exemplified by other fantasists or magic realists : Borges, Marquez, Kundera, or even...

... translation of Mort a cre­ dit, Death on the Installment Plan; the appearance of the two major novels on which Dickstein dwells, Philip Roth s Portnoy s Complaint and Joseph Heller s Catch-22; and the publication of such works as Vonnegut s Slaughterhouse-Five (analyzed by Philip Watts) and Pynchon s Gravity...

..., 1969); Charles Durden, No Bugles, No Drums (New York, 1976). References in my text are to these editions. 142 The South Atlantic Quarterly ingway, Jones, and Mailer. Eastlake s and Durden s, on the other hand, resemble more closely the new novel of war, as practiced by Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon...

... in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. terry caesar is Professor of English at Clarion University. He has written essays on a variety of topics parody, Thomas Pynchon, travel and recently completed a book on the academy. morris dickstein teaches English at Queens College and at the Gradu­...

... Neill and in the parodies of machine art of black humorists Barth, Heller, and Pynchon. With James s more hopeful posture, Wasserstrom improbably links Melville, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein s fragmented linguistic transformations and D. H. Lawrence s ritualistic transfigurations. If Adams presided...

... nation s history receives a Freudian reading. Adams s influence is more directly iden­ tified in Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, and Eugene O Neill and in the parodies of machine art of black humorists Barth, Heller, and Pynchon. With James s more hopeful posture, Wasserstrom improbably links Melville...

...: Kurt Vonnegut s Slaughterhouse Five, Thomas Pynchon s V, Norman Mailer s American Dream, Saul Bellow s Mr. Sammler s Planet or Herzog are not stories at all, but simply presentations of attitudes toward the modem predicament in one given situation. The degree to which there is an admission...

... offhandedly at the Christmas dinner table had most certainly been murdered by Reagan s operatives, with the consent of Casey himself. DeLillo has written this book, moreover, in the context of a con­ temporary fiction scene decisively shaped by the paranoid styles of Orwell, Burroughs, Mailer, Pynchon...

..., suspicious, even paranoid, and how interesting that key word of contemporary jargon becomes when it characterizes the main take on our culture from Emerson to Pynchon and DeLillo. The main literary line is political, but not in the trivial didactic sense of offering programs of renovation, or of en­...

.... mark dery: To return, for a moment, to this idea of discursive, non­ linear structure in your work. You admire Pynchon and Joyce, but in the writing of each, every image serves, arguably, to advance the plot, whereas in your work there s a sense of interchangeability one Signposts on the Road...

... conditions for subjectivity that give us such historical variants as J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Osama bin Laden. Reluctant and intrigued at the same time to be photographed for Brita’s ‘‘collection...

... that specter of decay in a regal, flaxen body symbolizing the hierarchy of values that ideologically anchor his white male subjectivity. The American writers who were apparently most influenced by Celine in the late 1930s and especially in the postwar years Henry Miller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip...

... exclusively on Wunderlick s earnings and in­ vestments. For Wunderlick s own purposes, of course, his money is spent or tied up. As in Pynchon s novels, the various undergrounds in Great Jones Street begin to intersect and begin more and more to resemble flaky, sinister spin-offs on the dominant culture...

... in 1638.* Massachusetts rightly claimed Pynchon s little settle­ ment as within the boundaries prescribed in her charter, while Connecticut tacitly contradicted her by occasionally exercising her authority there. In 1645 Connecticut revived the dispute by laying an imposition . . . upon goods passing...

..., all of the novels are explorations of systems theory. In In the Loop, LeClair aligns DeLillo with writers such as Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, creators of the novel of excess, a genre in which a surplus of information becomes the chief threat of modern life and the perfectly expressive...

... given new impetus through the absurd visions of Nathanael West s The Day of the Locust (with its title borrowed from Revela­ Dylan in the Sixties 169 tion), and renewed quite possibly by such novels as Joseph Heller s Catch-22, Thomas Pynchon s V, and Flannery O Connor s Wise Blood. By seeing...

... fowl or the melancholy days are come, Longfellow s Wreck of the Hesperus or A Skeleton in Armor, Lowell s Biglow Papers, one of Whittier s ballads like Maud Muller or two or three verses about scenery, Hawthorne s description of old Pynchon sitting dead in his chair in the Tale of Seven...

... in the novel with his contemporary colleague whose presence becomes part of the fabric of the fiction: Fowles, Doctorow, Styron, Pynchon) have taken centuries to be worked out, and, obviously, film makers can apply to their medium the implications of these understandings in the other arts. We have learned...