William M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978, $12.50). Pp. xvii, 268. - Mark Richard Siegel, Pynchon. Creative Paranoia in ‘Gravity's Rainbow’ (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978, $11.00). Pp. vii, 136.

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-334
Author(s):  
David Seed
PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
pp. 873-889 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Wolfley

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon shows his indebtedness to the school of psychoanalytic culture criticism best exhibited in the two major works of Norman O. Brown—Life against Death and Love's Body. Brown's neo-Freudian view of repression as the source of man's uniqueness in nature is mirrored in virtually every thematic aspect of Gravity's Rainbow. In one sense, the physical gravity of the title is a metaphor for the human repression that engages Pynchon on the psychological level. Pynchon's understanding of history, like Brown's, reflects “the slow return of the repressed.” Other themes include the hypertrophy of the death instinct as manifested in weapons of destruction, the pernicious influence of Calvinist dualism opposing true dialectics, the interdependent abuses of sexuality and power, and the need for an antirational conception of art based in transcendental symbolism. The novel enacts the struggle of life against death, and its style affirms man's freedom.


Author(s):  
Nina Engelhardt

Chapter 4 sets the engagement with modernist mathematics into broader context when examining the rise, fall and transformation of Enlightenment thinking and science in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. This chapter also zeroes in on a topic that runs through all chapters: the interrelations of mathematics and fiction. The analysis focuses on illustrations of fictionality regarding the mathematical concepts of infinitesimals, the calculus, and probability theory and their philosophical and ethical consequences. The examination of interdependent ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ elements in mathematics provides a new perspective on Brian McHale’s identification of ontological uncertainty as the novel’s definitive postmodernist trait: the chapter shows that the novel’s renegotiation of mathematics is a decisive factor in its introduction of postmodernist features. As the title ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ with its combination of a scientific and a poetical image implies, Pynchon’s novel suggests that the shared use of fictional concepts both in mathematics and in literature connects the seemingly opposed realms.


Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Łukasz Barciński

The article discusses contemporary American writer Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, a leading representative of postmodernism in literature. The study contains an examination of possible references to Puritanism in his novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. Religious motifs seem to play a crucial role in the interpretation of Pynchon’s work where the past is combined with the present and the Puritan religious doctrine merges with a paranoid approach to reading. Then, fragments from Gravity’s Rainbow in Polish translation are analyzed in terms of preserving the source text’s productive potential regarding the most important Puritan themes in the novel, e.g. animal symbolism and the doctrine of Preterition. Finally, the study offers conclusions related to the extent to which Puritan elements are recreated in the target text, highlighting the most considerable losses and gains in the translation process.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 139-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Pederson

AbstractIt is tempting to read Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow—with its shell-shocked refugees fleeing across a missile-pocked, post-war landscape—as an eschatological text that plays out religious end-times scenarios. However, an invented citation from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas included as a chapter epigraph—“Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in hell today”—suggests that we should do otherwise. In grafting a playful fragment about Jesus, judgment, and hell onto Thomas, Pynchon parodies a common need to read eschatological themes back into non-eschatological texts. In doing so, he also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting his own book. Ultimately, Pynchon’s own rocket-gospel is likewise a non-eschatological text. Like Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow stymies readers’ efforts to derive a clear eschatology from it—or to read one back into it. In this essay, I contend that Pynchon enacts a number of strategies to keep his audience from reading classic end-times scenarios into his own work, all of which are prefigured by the Gospel of Thomas.


2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOANNA FREER

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression.


2020 ◽  
pp. 240-259
Author(s):  
Łukasz Barciński

The Hypergeneric Spectrum of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon in Polish Translation The study deals with the issue of genre in translation with reference to the Polish rendition of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Upon analysing the hypergeneric and heteroglottic aspect of the novel, by enumerating the possible classifications of the novel’s genre and facets of language variety, the study offers a new perspective on genre classification from the vantage point of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, namely by the introduction of the term quasi-transcendental as the name of a superordinate genre, which could include not only Pynchon’s but also Derrida’s works. The recreation of a genre defined in this way in the act of translation consists in determining the pivotal elements in the text, which activate the process of signification concerning chains of binarities in Gravity’s Rainbow, i.e. the motifs of “interface” and “linearity” (related to the motif of “fold”, which could also become a diagrammatic model for the whole quasi-transcendental genre). Finally, the study offers conclusions as to the theory and practice of translation of higher-order genres such as the one posited herein.


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