Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins

by Niran Abbas (Editor)

Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins is a collection of essays by various academics looking at how identity is shaped, gendered, and contested throughout Pynchon's work. By exploring sociological, anthropological, literary, and political dimensions, the contributors revise important ideas in the debate over individualism using political and feminist theory and examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narratives generated by America's culture. The first half of the book is a site for the mutually constitutive interaction between discourses about the body and the materiality of specific bodies. These essays serve as the locus for thinking differently about both feminist histories and feminist futures, and the political aims of cultural criticisms. The second half of the book questions the context and pretext of political ideas of nationhood, political states, and political parties, the economic divisions of fiscal and monetary policies, and the sociological concepts of societies, tribes, and families. The papers question the forces of monopoly to exclude and obscure the underside of the American dream, the degradation of dreams, and what dreams become. With its interdisciplinary approach, Thomas Pynchon, will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, culture, gender studies, sociology, and politcs.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002