Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1988

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Allen Dunn

Committee Members

B. J. Leggett, James E. Gill

Abstract

The fiction of Thomas Pynchon can be complex and difficult. However, it can be usefully illuminated through an intertextual comparison to a number of other works. In this study I will read the texts of Pynchon within a broad general framework that includes Menippean satire, postmodernism, modern science, modern philosophy, and poststructuralist literary theory. In addition, I will specifically include in this intertextual juxtaposition the works of individual authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. Three major characteristics of Pynchon's texts are revealed by means of this intertextual reading. First, I will show how Pynchon's texts are literally constructed from other texts by a technique of bricolage; however, I will also show that Pynchon's texts reveal a complex "hyper-ironic" attitude toward their source materials that makes the exact implications of this technique ultimately undecidable. Second, I will discuss the various ways in which Pynchon's texts seek to create a polyphony of meaning that resists any univocal interpretation; here I will give special attention to metaphor, allegory, characterization, and reader involvement in Pynchon's texts. Finally, I will describe the radical way in which Pynchon's texts deny narrative closure, thereby undermining any attempts at totalizing or impoverishing interpretation and opposing traditional Western notions of Aristotelian logic.

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