scholarly journals “Orders Behind the Visible” – Puritan Elements in the Polish Translation of "Gravity’s Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon

Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Łukasz Barciński
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
Productive Potential

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.

Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
pp. 873-889 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Wolfley
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Instinct ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow

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.

scholarly journals The Intricacies of the Postmodern Convention – Thomas Ruggles Pynchon in Polish Translation

Ad Americam ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Łukasz Barciński
Keyword(s):  
Special Focus ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
Productive Potential ◽  
Literary Environment

The article presents the prominent figure of the contemporary American writer, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, a leading representative of the postmodern literary convention. The study contains a brief introduction of his works, with a special focus on the canonical novel for the postmodern convention i.e. Gravity’s Rainbow. The study will also apply McHale’s concept of ‘ontological dominant,’ which aptly describes the shift from epistemological issues to existential ones occurring from modernist to postmodernist literature. Subsequently, the article discusses the main aspects of Pynchon’s literary works and e.g. the presumed mode of reading i.e. ‘creative paranoia,’ encyclopaedicity and the interpretatively inconclusive binarities. Then, two fragments from Gravity’s Rainbow in Polish translation are analyzed in terms of the preservation of the source text sense productive potential according to Venuti’s theory of ‘foreignization.’ Finally, the study offers conclusions related to the reasons as to why there seem to be considerable deficiencies in the Polish rendition of Pynchon’s novels, attributing this fact to the lack of an equivalent literary convention in the Polish literary environment.

scholarly journals Hipergeneryczne spektrum Tęczy grawitacji Thomasa Pynchona w przekładzie na język polski

2020 ◽  
pp. 240-259
Author(s):  
Łukasz Barciński
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Language Variety ◽  
Genre Classification ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One

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.

Confronting the Monolith: Authority and the Cold War in Gravity's Rainbow

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN HAMILL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

scholarly journals Nostalgia as a cultural marker in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (26) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stipe Grgas
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The Road ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Us

The author concentrates on the thematic of nostalgia in Thomas Pynchon's most famous novel which, in his view, undoubtedly enplaces Gravity's Rainbow into the very center of American culture. The author analyses, with particular care, the analepsis within the novel in which Pynchon describes the Puritan origins of American civilisation which function not only as the primary backdrop for delineating the main character but encompass the dynamics of a historical dilema which profoundly influenced the later development of the US. The author shows how the nostalgia for the road not taken by the American polity permeates Pynchon's novel but also how the dystopian outcome of utopian beginnings has broader cultural implications.

Mathematics and Fiction: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’S Rainbow

2018 ◽  
pp. 126-156
Author(s):  
Nina Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Mathematical Concepts ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Ontological Uncertainty

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.

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