Thomas Pynchon: Annotated Bibliography (3 Items)

Pynchon Bibliography

Thomas Pynchon: Annotated Bibliography

Kolodny, Annette and David James Peters. "Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: The Novel as Subversive Experience." Modern Fiction Studies 19.1 (Spring 1973): 79-87. Web.

The authors of this article suggest that the heroine of the novel is undergoing a learning experience, and that the novel's sudden ending without revealing whether the Trystero conspiracy is real or imaginary is actually a way of demonstrating the heroine's personal growth. Kolodny and Peters argue that the function of the conspiracy in the book is to help the heroine realize that she is alienated from American life in the 1960s, and as a result the sense of waiting for a religious experience at the end of the book is a positive thing: Oedipa has finally understood herself through this process. In other words, the novel's ambiguous ending is actually a "subversive experience" for the reader, and this subversion is a good thing for Pynchon's readers as well as for the novel's heroine.

Mendelson, Edward. "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49." Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978. 112-46. Print.

Mendelson's essay interprets Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 as a sort of religious parable. He suggests that a recurrent theme of the novel is "hierophany," or the appearance of sacred or divine presence in ordinary daily life. Mendelson finds a pattern of symbolism in which the number in the book's title alludes to the Christian feast of Pentecost, which falls 49 days after Easter. Pentecost is associated with the visitation of the Holy Spirit, and Mendelson sees the novel's heroine waiting for a religious revelation at the end of the book. Mendelson focuses on the book's indeterminate ending, in which the reader does not learn if the conspiracy of the Trystero is real or not: instead, he demonstrates that its description in the novel is always in terms of a religious experience, or mental illness (paranoia). Mendelson also notes how the heroine encounters different people with religious-seeming patterns of false belief, suggesting that the whole thing may be a mental construct. He notes that the way the heroine examines a painting and attempts to come up with its meaning ("shall I project a world?") is the way in which the novel itself asks to be read.

Palmeri, Frank. "Neither Literally nor as a Metaphor: Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and the Structure of Scientific Revolution." English Literary History 54.4 (Winter 1987): 979-99. Web.