Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, and: Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, and: Understanding Thomas Pynchon (review)

1987 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-337
Author(s):  
Brooke K. Horvath
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Postmodern Fiction

scholarly journals The Silicon Valley Novel

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Paul Eve ◽  
Joe Street
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Dave Eggers

In this article we propose that one of the emergent, but under-charted, and as yet unnamed thematic strands in recent American fiction and that contributes to recent literary history is that of the ‘Silicon Valley novel’. The trend can be seen in the literary fiction of Tony Tulathimutte, Jarett Kobek, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Dave Eggers, to name but a few, but also in the trilogy of novels by Ann Bridges dubbed, ‘The Silicon Valley Trilogy’. Silicon Valley novels are concerned with the emergent technological industry in the Bay Area but they are also of a specific periodising moment. Hence, while named for the geography, we here situate the Silicon Valley novel as more tied to time in the early twenty-first century.

Matrices and Metaverses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Neal Stephenson ◽  
Electronic Writing ◽  
Post War

The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.

scholarly journals A Postmodern Reading of Don DeLillo’s Short Stories

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Sameen Shahid ◽  
Arooba Khurram
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Multiple Realities ◽  
Subjective Reality ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Fredric Jameson

The focus of this paper is to study how different techniques are incorporated in the postmodern fiction to present the multiplicity of meaning and subjectivity of the reality. For this purpose, the researcher has selected American novelist and short story writer Donald Richard DeLillo’s short stories “The Itch” and “Coming. Sun. Mon. Tues”. The researcher has analyzed the selected works using the theoretical frameworks provided by Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon and Henri Bergson. The theoretical insights of the selected theorists help understand the subjective reality of the postmodernism. Textual analysis has been used as a method to study the selected fictional work. Postmodernism is critical of certain foundational conventions of philosophy, specifically, the Enlightenment thinking, as it symbolizes the pursuit of reason and logic. On the other hand, it focuses on the personalization and subjectivity in the construction of truth and worldviews. The rejection of objective reality gives way to multiple realities and subjectivity. American fiction, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been influenced by postmodernism to a great extent. The analyzed short stories provide a good postmodern reading since they cover a range of features that are relatable in the postmodern world.

scholarly journals Entropy’s Enemies: Postmodern Fission and Transhuman Fusion in the Post-War Era

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Jordan Burr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Western Values ◽  
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Universe

In the early to mid-twentieth century, thermodynamic entropy—the inevitable diffusion of usable energy in the Universe—became a ubiquitous metaphor for the dissolution of Western values and cultural energy. Many Golden Age science fiction writers portrayed twentieth century technological progress as anti-entropic, a sign of Universal progress and unity which might postpone or negate both cultural and thermodynamic forms of entropy. Following the evolutionary metaphysics of Georg Hegel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Golden Age science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov imagined the creation of powerful collective beings whose unitary existence signified the defeat of entropy. In contrast, later literary postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Pamela Zoline often accepted and even exalted in the chaotic, liberating potential of entropy. In postmodern fiction, the disorder of entropy was often compared favorably to the stifling hegemony of cultural universalism. More broadly, these two responses might be understood to represent two societal stages of grief-- denial and acceptance—to the new trauma introduced to the world by the parallel concepts of cultural entropy and a Universal “heat death.”

scholarly journals "Inherent Vice": Thomas Pynchon beyond the Postmodern Fiction and Anti-Detective Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-294
Author(s):  
Antonio Di Vilio
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Crying Of Lot 49

This article analyzes the development of noir genre in Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon in 2009. In fact, this novel seems to be a time of reflection about all shifts and changes of detective fiction, starting from the Californian hard-boiled school and the postmodern anti-detective fiction to the contemporary noir. In Inherent Vice Pynchon shows his awareness and considerations about the genre tradition – to which some of his novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 belong– playing out a thought-provoking parodic representation of the detective story and its doom. This paper aims to decrypt the meaning of the references that Inherent Vice contains about noir genre and to detect what is the position of the author in writing this novel. 

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