Orbit (Cambridge)最新文献

{"title":"Attenuated Realities: Pynchon's Trajectory from V. to Inherent Vice","authors":"K. Hume","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.50","url":null,"abstract":"Part of what established Pynchon as postmodern was his piling up of multiple realities. Hence, the surprise that Inherent Vice retains only the most attenuated forms of such worlds alternative to our own. In earlier fiction, we find a world served by the Tristero postal system, a world inhabited by angels, by thanatoids and other forms of the dead, by Japanese film monsters, by giant vegetables. In Pynchon’s fictive realities, an airship can sail beneath desert sand or through the center of the globe via Symmes’s Hole, and the photograph of a corpse can be run backward in time to show its murderer. Up through Against the Day , Pynchon showered us with alternate realities that reached beyond the material world that most of us accept as alles, was der Fall ist . Inherent Vice departs from this vision. Has Pynchon simply grown up? Or grown old? Or is something else operating here? I will provide a brief taxonomy of Pynchon’s multiple worlds as characterized by paranoia, mysticism, religion, and humor and then analyze what remains of these in Inherent Vice . Among the causes for his changed technique may be his choice of genre. The detective story is epistemological rather than ontological in its questions, so Pynchon concerns himself far more with what Doc Sportello can know than with making him navigate through multiple realities. I argue, however, that Inherent Vice is surprisingly a worst-case scenario for Pynchon.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William Gaddis’s Immortality: Celebration, Cartoon, or Corruption?","authors":"Crystal Alberts","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.66","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.66","url":null,"abstract":"Although ostensibly a review of The Letters of William Gaddis edited by Steven Moore (Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2013), this article evaluates Moore’s volume in light of generally accepted practices of scholarly editions and the handling of historical documents. In particular, Alberts compares some of Moore’s edited letters to the originals housed either at Washington University in St. Louis or the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin and reveals issues involving the representation of the archival material, inconsistencies in editorial principles, and a misattributed letter, among other things.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here”: The Significance of the Hansel and Gretel Fairy Tale in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow","authors":"Anahita Rouyan","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.46","url":null,"abstract":"Among the cultural texts used by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) figures a classic fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel”. It is here that the author initially develops the theme of bad parents and victimized children, a subject elaborated throughout Gravity’s Rainbow . By placing the fairy tale in a broader framework of Teutonic mythology, with its heathen gods and goddesses, Pynchon demonstrates the workings of cultural conditioning not only on individual characters, but also on narratives initially unfit in the dominant culture. The theme of “Hansel and Gretel” refers to one of the central questions of Gravity’s Rainbow as well, that of the possibility of freedom for a culturally conditioned entity, be it an individual or a narrative.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Defending Pynchon's Publicity: It is Pynchonian","authors":"M. Kohut","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.59","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.59","url":null,"abstract":"An analysis of some of the ironies of the trailer for Bleeding Edge , particularly the role of the narrator as he reflects some of Pynchon's themes.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (2013)","authors":"M. Eve","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.60","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.60","url":null,"abstract":"Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review of Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon","authors":"A. Rolls","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.51","url":null,"abstract":"A review of Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming novel, Bleeding Edge. Review of Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"To Cry from Within or Without? Pynchon and the Modern – Postmodern Divide.","authors":"Lawrence Harvey","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V2.1.47","url":null,"abstract":"This article interrogates the demarcation of modern and postmodern literature within the context of a critical and inter-textual reading of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 . Approaching Pynchon’s text from what is essentially a formalist perspective, this reading readdresses the question as to whether or not The Crying of Lot 49 breaks through to a mode of fiction beyond modernism itself. Critics such as Brain McHale have forwarded The Crying of Lot 49 as a paradigmatic late modernist work; a work that does not break through to a mode of fiction beyond underlying epistemological presuppositions. Via a comparative reading that draws on the work of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis et al , it is argued herein that McHale’s otherwise scholarly reading is somewhat myopic. In short, it is argued that although Pynchon’s heroine is driven by an epistemological agenda, the text-scape she inhabits is postmodern.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Very Nice Indeed: Cyprian Latewood's Masochistic Sublime, and the Religious Pluralism of Against the Day","authors":"M. Jarvis","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V1.2.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V1.2.45","url":null,"abstract":"My paper deals with mythological/religious imagery and syncretic soteriologies in Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day , focusing in particular on the character of Cyprian Latewood, bisexual spy, Orpheus stand-in, and masochist par excellence. Cyprian’s path throughout the novel is specifically an Orphic descent/return myth, but it also deals with issues of mystical transcendence, metempsychosis, Dionysian ekstasis , and Buddhist nirvana . These are represented at the macro level in themes such as retreat from the world, neo-monasticism, anarchic activism, or hope for transcendent knowledge, and also within specific images and scenes, such as those involving flight, self-negation, disembodied voices, and the final voyage of the Chums of Chance, a Manichaean allegory of escape. Cyprian’s final home at a Bogomil-Orphic monastery near Thrace serves to tie together disparate religio-political strands within the novel, including a syncretic teleology (Gnostic/Buddhist/Manichaean) and countercultural activism. It is simultaneously a retreat from the world – a political move with relevance to the history of the Bogomils as both persecuted sect and social agitators – and also a move towards transcendence through gnostic ritual. There are a few important results of this reading, touching on religious, mythological, and Pynchon studies, and sexual and political discourse. Firstly, it challenges the ease with which Western, and specifically Christian, ideologies appropriate counter-discourses in acts of cultural hegemony, exemplified in one instance by Kathryn Hume’s early reading of the novel’s ethos as explicitly Roman Catholic, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (“The Religious and Political Vision of Against the Day ”, 2007). Secondly, though other critics have gestured at the presence of Orphism and Buddhism in Against the Day , they have failed to convincingly tie these concerns to a larger conversation around Pynchon’s oeuvre and the meaning of the evolution of the author’s religious vision. None, so far as I know, have commented on the expressly Manichaean concepts in the work, and the consequences of the presence of this specific cosmological binary. Lastly, by making the heroic Cyprian the focus of the novel’s transcendental religious narrative, the author complicates two assumptions which have lingered unquestioned for far too long in Pynchon studies, namely the anti-metaphysics of his earth-centered onto-epistemology, and the inherent homophobia present in  a worldview which privileges the nuclear, procreative family structure and seems to use homosexuality and sadomasochism strictly in negative significations, as metaphors for unequal political and economic power dynamics (see Julie Christine Sears’ “Black and White Rainbows and Blurry Lines”).  This paper resists the reductive impulse towards conclusiveness, but rather seeks to complicate existing readings while pushing forward into new territory by synthesizing a","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thomas Pynchon and the Vacuum Salesman in Guadalajara","authors":"A. Rolls","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V1.2.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V1.2.43","url":null,"abstract":"The article documents the contents of Thomas Pynchon's essay \"Hallowe'en? Over Already?,\" positing that the approach Pynchon takes to discussing the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, a tour of which Pynchon describes provides an approach for writing a biography of Pynchon.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review of \"How had it ever happened here?\": A Constructivist Reading of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and its Role in the Pynchon Canon, by Yvonne Klose (2012)","authors":"Zac Rowlinson","doi":"10.7766/ORBIT.V1.2.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7766/ORBIT.V1.2.41","url":null,"abstract":"Review of \"How had it ever happened here?\": A Constructivist Reading of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and its Role in the Pynchon Canon , by Yvonne Klose (2012)","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71318420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}