Pynchon’s California by Scott McClintock, John Miller
Requirements: .PDF reader, 8.1 MB
Overview: This collection of essays on the more accessible California novels of Thomas Pynchon—The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), and Inherent Vice (2009)—is definitely valuable for scholars of Pynchon, American literature, and twentieth-century culture. The appeal of these novels is not only are they bridges to his more daunting works like V. (1963), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006), but these novels also deserve attention for their reworking of the detective genre in a California setting with Republicans like Nixon and Reagan as well as the stereotypical hippies and potheads, two groups juxtaposed along the lines of the elect and preterite in Pynchon. In these novels, California, the quintessential America as a sunny natural paradise, ends up as a historical anticlimax in ecological and political distress, although some redemptive characters and signs are present. Aptly, Pynchon also uses California for the setting of his anti-climactic endings in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day, as John Miller points out in his essay. As the twentieth-century zeitgeist has arguably been captured in Pynchon’s longer works, the three California novels and this collection become helpful entryways into American culture as it is full of hippiphanes (to borrow a coinage in Inherent Vice), epiphanies or (hippie/hip) insights into Pynchon’s California. Many Americanists who do not study Pynchon will appreciate the essays on ecology, the labor movement, film, real estate and highways treated below, but a few essays will mainly appeal to critics and students of postmodern literature.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational > Collection of essays
Download Instructions:
http://festyy.com/wBtlo0
http://festyy.com/wBtlop
