Oedipa Maas

[kellner at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Eric Weinstein's analysis of Oedipa Maas and Pierce Inverarity is
wonderful and I will print it out for my students when we began reading
LOT49 next week. I would add that Mucho Maas brings Spanish into play,
with "mas" signifying more, symbolic of consumerist attitude of the time.
TRP was living in Mexico in this period, or so we are told, and there is a
reference to a "hotel room in Mazatlan" in the opening paragraph
suggesting we bring Espanol into semiotic play here...
Also, "Pierce" evokes a slight semiotic displacement to Peirce, Charles
Sanders and thus Semiotics itself since, after all, all of TRP's names are
overcoded semiotic constructions as is the entire universe of his novels
and a large part of our own as well...

Douglas Kellner, Dept of Philosophy, Univ of Texas, Austin, TX 78712
kellner at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  fax: 512 471-4806
Web sites: Postmodern theory= http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kellner/pm/pm.html
Critical theory= http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/