Literary Ethics

The enforced sexual servitude of Korean women and girls, so-called "comfort women," under the Japanese military occupation of World War Two has, since the early 1990s, become a significant issue in global sexual politics. In lectures and written ...

This paper elucidates the structure and scope of Pynchon's temporal imagination by studying the complex relations between narrative time and modality in his 1997 novel Mason & Dixon using the conceptual framework of contemporary narratology. It argues that Pynchon's use of the subjunctive mode allows him not only to articulate the political and ideological concerns in his vision of America on the eve of its founding but also to address the problems of historicity, causality and irreversibility of time. By employing the subjunctive as a general narrative strategy, Mason & Dixon challenges the various temporal regimes and discourses of modernity, and projects imaginative re-figurations of time and space. In carrying this out, the novel moves beyond what Pynchon calls "the network of ordinary latitude and longitude" (Against the Day 250) and replaces a totalizing singularity with plurality of times and timescapes.

This thesis considers the opposing, but integrally connected themes of linearity and return as a starting point for a discussion of the novels of Thomas Pynchon, from The Crying of Lot 49 to his most recent novel Vineland (1990). The recurrence of these two basic tenets in his fiction are indicative of a preoccupation with the conflicts that characterize a civilization built upon the Cartesian basis of subject/object duality. These conflicts are overseen in Pynchon's writing by a cyclical, unified cosmos against which the accelerating evils of technology and industrialization are representative of a doomed impulse to achieve transcendence in material terms. Pynchon's writing emphasizes the everbalancing nature of the universal forces that lie behind this complex scenario, and places the current global situation of ecological, sociological and technological crises inside a larger recurring whole. The potential for transcendence exists in Pynchon's fictive world, albeit tentatively so, but whatever universal absolute is in existence, i t cannot be approached by premeditated design, and respect for a balanced, regenerative universe is at least suggested as the most immediate object for our attention. These are most conspicuously the concerns present in Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland. Chapter One examines the idea in less complex form in The Crying of Lot 49, and focuses on Pynchon's use of music as metaphor and supporting device in his delineation of the difficult boundaries of the Cartesian dichotomy. Chapters Two to Six consider the ideas as they are present in Gravity's Rainbow, Chapter Four using the findings of LSD research to suggest a possible framework for some of the novel's most difficult aspects. Chapter Seven serves as both a consideration of Vineland and as a conclusion to this study, since Pynchon's latest novel restates the fundamental preoccupations of his previous writing in a fresh and vivdly contemporary form. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged.

The author of the article will discuss the problem of validity thinking about the basic statements of Literary Ethics. Though the problems Literary Ethics emphasizes are global and at the same time rather abstract, the efforts of literary researchers to educate readers with the help of novels are understandable but seem ineffectual. Young readers are not capable of understanding complicated texts of the previous century because of the different contents of their mental spaces or the different schemes of thinking. Literary Ethics speaks about the importance of the role of emotions while reading novels, but the spectrum of primary emotions young readers experience while reading complicated literary texts blocks all the ways to deeper understanding and the ability to analyze specific ethical issues encoded in the novels. The theory of emotions explains the situation and in a way rehabilitates young readers. Nevertheless, particular transformations of genres or of the original form of l...

This paper briefly explores the testimony of three reputable persons who attempted to expose three famous Victorian authors as imposters; and one such imposter who revealed his own crime of plagiarism in such a disarming manner, that he got away with the crime.

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, religi...

Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow (henceforth, GR) is an unmatched example of the fictional technique of secret history, an approach to the historical novel which attempts to "connect the dots" behind actual world events. This critical thesis examines the historical artifacts Pynchon deploys (brands, jargon, intertextual references, etc.) and argues that their role in this fiction is not mere verisimilitude, but rather, a coherent collection of purposive, meaningful symbols distributed through the text to achieve specific thematic effects. The relevance of this approach to the author's current project, a secret history also set at the end of WWII, will be explored.

The third volume of Helen Garner's diaries, How to End a Story: Diaries Volume III 1995-1998, said to be the last in the series, purports to chronicle the breakdown of Garner's third marriage. In Australia we have something called no-fault divorce; here Garner is serving up instead a score-settling hatchet job on an ex that is without precedent in Australian letters.

Both FOLFIRINOX and gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel (G-nP) are used increasingly in the neoadjuvant treatment (NAT) of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA). This study aimed to compare neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX and G-nP in the treatment of resectable (R) and borderline resectable (BR) head PDA. A single-institution retrospective review of R and BR patients undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomy after NAT with FOLFIRINOX or G-nP was performed. Comparative analysis was performed using inverse-probability-weighted (IPW) estimators. The end points of the study were overall survival (OS) and an 80% reduction in CA19-9 with NAT. In this study, 193 patients were analyzed, with 73 patients receiving FOLFIRINOX and 120 patients receiving G-nP. The median OS was 38.7 months for FOLFIRINOX versus 28.6 months for G-nP (p = 0.214). The patients who received FOLFIRINOX were younger and had fewer comorbidities, more BR disease, and larger tumors than those treated with G-nP (all p < 0.05). The two regime...

The only hope, I suppose, is if we haven't come home exactly,-I mean, if it's not the same, not really,-if we might count upon that failure to re-arrive perfectly, to be seen in all the rest of Creation.. .. " (Mason & Dixon 755) The new nation, the nation of civil law, can suppress madness-the mad are locked up-but children are still around; and it is to them that the forbidden passions are assigned. At least until the romance is over and real life begins. (Alryyes 190

The article deals with the concept of dominant with regard to the translation process and various definitions of this term (e.g. the translative dominant as defined by Bednarczyk). Then the study presents the works by Thomas Pynchon, a leading postmodern American writer, stressing the possibility of applying a wide spectrum of translative dominants to his multifaceted fiction, which explores the aesthetic ambiguities within the postmodern literary convention. Finally, the article offers two main translative dominants as adequate for the analysis of Pynchon's works in translation i.e. the ontological dominant and the sacral dominant. The description of the ontological dominant draws heavily on McHale's understanding of this concept, while the discussion of the sacral dominant involves the possible analogy of approach to translation between texts within the postmodern convention such as Pynchon's and sacral texts e.g. the Bible.

The article deals with the concept of dominant with regard to the translation process and various definitions of this term (e.g. the translative dominant as defined by Bednarczyk). Then the study presents the works by Thomas Pynchon, a leading postmodern American writer, stressing the possibility of applying a wide spectrum of translative dominants to his multifaceted fiction, which explores the aesthetic ambiguities within the postmodern literary convention. Finally, the article offers two main translative dominants as adequate for the analysis of Pynchon's works in translation i.e. the ontological dominant and the sacral dominant. The description of the ontological dominant draws heavily on McHale's understanding of this concept, while the discussion of the sacral dominant involves the possible analogy of approach to translation between texts within the postmodern convention such as Pynchon's and sacral texts e.g. the Bible.

The article deals with the concept of dominant with regard to the translation process and various definitions of this term (e.g. the translative dominant as defined by Bednarczyk). Then the study presents the works by Thomas Pynchon, a leading postmodern American writer, stressing the possibility of applying a wide spectrum of translative dominants to his multifaceted fiction, which explores the aesthetic ambiguities within the postmodern literary convention. Finally, the article offers two main translative dominants as adequate for the analysis of Pynchon's works in translation i.e. the ontological dominant and the sacral dominant. The description of the ontological dominant draws heavily on McHale's understanding of this concept, while the discussion of the sacral dominant involves the possible analogy of approach to translation between texts within the postmodern convention such as Pynchon's and sacral texts e.g. the Bible.

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.

The rhetorical concept of kairos (right timing, right proportion, time viewed qualitatively) can expand the understanding of the "points" or decisive moments in Pynchon's historical novels. In addition to timeliness, kairos for theologians represents the intersection of the sacred with the profane. Kairos also provides insight into the novels' affect, lending rhetorical force to the concept from Marx that "the point is to change [history]." Following the hiatus preceding Vineland, Pynchon's global view of history becomes more restricted, with emphasis instead on smaller social enclaves and human connections.

This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells.

This paper examines Thomas Pynchon’s fiction as an investigation of the
metaphysical preconditions necessary for any concrete political approach to succeed in an era in which capitalism’s destruction of possibilities alternative to itself seems like a fait accompli. Such a reading requires a broadened conception of ‘economy’, taking in affective and rhetorical structures as well as financial ones, all of which hinge on details of Pynchon’s metaphysical worldbuilding that recent ‘politics first’ criticism has downplayed. Pynchon grants existence to many worlds, but makes them all subordinate to our own. How, he asks, could we, in our world and timeline, recuperate the lost or cynically destroyed possibilities of the past such that they can become present again, and operate to improve that world? I use the non-fiction Pynchon published between Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990) to identify how Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006) frame and answer this question. I then show exactly how the specific metaphysical structures Pynchon generates lead to specific affective dynamics between text and reader that can be understood as economies insofar as they allocate energy to specific political imperatives.

Viewing Pynchon as a historical novel means paying due attention to what he describes particularly in Gravity's Rainbow as nodes or decision points. These can best be considered with reference to kairos, the Greek term for qualitative time, which refers to proper timing and proportion. In his works through GR, Pynchon aspires to change our understanding of history, and press home lessons in present-day contexts, through drawing attention to these nodes; however, in the works from Vineland on, he generally advocates withdrawal into social and familial enclaves for more localized protection.

Enough is now known of Thomas Pynchon's biography, and even his ancestry, to make a conventional summary of his life possible. Despite the relevance of such a biography its availability obscures Pynchon's own unique attitude to self-promotion, whereby, as the critic Tony Tanner noted, "no contemporary writer has achieved such fame and such anonymity at the same time" (Tanner 1982: 12).To this day he has never given an interview, and the only photograph of the author that has ever been made public shows him as a teenager. Reflective perhaps of nothing more than his own natural shyness and modesty (even his entry in the freshman register at Cornell university contains a blank space rather than a photograph), he has remained true to his desire to stay out of the public gaze despite having by 1973 published three novels (V [1963]; The Crying of Lot 49 [1966]; Gravity's Rainbow [1973]) that confirmed his standing as one of the greatest and most challenging innovators in twentieth-century American fiction. Whereas Pynchon's fiction brings the lives of the forgotten and the discarded into the foreground, the opposite impulse has dictated his attitude to the details of his own life. Born on the 8 th May 1937 in Long Island, New York, Pynchon's High School career was crowned in 1953 with an award for the highest average marks in the study of English. Despite his strength in this area it was science that attracted him after he won a scholarship to attend Cornell University, and he enrolled in the division of Engineering Physics. He interrupted his studies to join the navy and when he returned to college in the autumn of 1957 he changed the focus of his degree, transferring to the College of Arts and Sciences and taking his degree in English. He continued to excel at this subject

While teaching as an exchange lecturer in Mainz, Germany, students misperceived me as a Californian, leading me to an unexpected responsibility for the state's history and culture. As one of my courses turned to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, students' questions about Californian politics motivated me to break with the traditional reading of Lot 49 as a postmodern novel, whose play with textual references precludes any interpretation distinguishing between "fiction" and "history." Instead, I developed an approach to teaching Lot 49 that situates the novel's interpretive difficulties within the historical and political terrain of its contemporary California. At first encouraging students to participate in the paranoid tendencies of Lot 49, floating freely between its many interconnected references and signs, we drew attention to the novel's aesthetic and the way it encourages this paranoia. Calling our own reading practice into question, we then explored the politics of paranoia, complicating the familiar narrative of California's New Left with the less commonly taught history of the New Right. By letting students piece together this political backdrop in the novel, they discover for themselves what their earlier paranoid reading had obscured. Concluding with a portable lesson on the politics of literature, I explain how this approach to The Crying of Lot 49 emphasizes an aesthetic politics: encouraging students to become conscious of the experience of reading a text-both what entices them and what remains at first unseen-and situating that process of reception within the social space of the novel.

Gravity's Rainbow is among the “most widely celebrated, unread novels” of American literature and already “a piece of minor folklore.” Pynchon's genius manifests itself in his uniquely wide range of subject matter and literary techniques of presentation, narration, and interpretation. Gravity's Rainbow is a novel based on various sets of parallels, oppositions and double structures. These parallel patterns are abundant both in the structure of the novel, and in the content, characterization, and themes. In this paper two of these binaries, paranoia and antiparanoia, are discussed to show how Pynchon enjoys involving his characters and his readers in a cosmos in which no absolute truth and no singular concept can survive on its own; a universe in which certainty is a luxury that no one can reach.
Keywords:  Gravity's Rainbow,  Paranoia,  Anti-Paranoia, Postmodern Novel, Thomas Pynchon

This essay argues that comparative literature should not be theorized in terms of how comparison appears, but rather how it does not fully appear. By focusing on the (in)comparability of catastrophic events, Pynchon’s work suggests that comparison is “avisual,” since it takes place as the splitting apart of the day

Offering one of the first critical receptions on identity in Thomas Pynchon's latest novel beyond the reviews, this paper seeks to show that bilocation, a fictional disposition affecting personal mobility in Against The Day, brings up the question of what we are by suggesting what we could be. It investigates how the novel redefines and enlarges concepts of identity by exploring several aspects of sameness and selfhood exposed to a very special kind of migration: Being in two places, countries, or worlds at the same time, a multiplicity of characters in Against The Day opt for the excluded middle when a fork in the road presents itself. The paper investigates these new forms of identity in the novel and explores their impact on philosophical concepts such as the notion of a seamless continuity of identity, the role of subjectivity for identity, and the concept of a narrative identity.

Criticism on Thomas Pynchon’s post-Vineland novels has, to a remarkable degree throughout the years since Vineland was released, examined those novels primarily in critical terms – paranoia, indeterminacy, absent centres, etc. - that were established through the canonising of his first three novels. 
Against such readings, this paper provides grounds for examining Pynchon’s post-Vineland work through preoccupations that differentiate it from, rather than yoking it to, the earlier novels.  It takes as an exemplar the recent novels’ increasing focus on questions of obligation and competing duties, addressing how such a focus situates Pynchon’s work in relation to the dominant discourses in contemporary literary ethics, with their emphases on alterity and indeterminacy at the expense of decision-making.
The essay first shows how the relationship between paranoia and obligation shifted between Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, then demonstrates how acknowledging the centrality of obligation to the recent work allows a coherent and systematic cross-novel treatment of recurrent plot mechanics such as those relating to debt and patronage.

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature.

This paper uses a Wittgensteinian framework to analyze the ethical representation of otherness in Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “Her Majesty’s Servants.” These texts address a central dilemma in representing difference, that the mere fact of viable, verifiable otherness problematizes the universal validity of one’s representational practices. By analyzing the tension between comprehension and incomprehension in narrating talking animals, this paper critiques the colonial tendency to domesticate otherness by describing it, arguing instead that one can productively respond to difference only by recognizing but not transgressing the limits of representation.