Eddins, "Depraved New World"

[Terrance]

"The current critical consensus seems to be, that these
quests are epistemological missions impossible, finally
foundering---as they must---in undecidability; and that the
general revelation of the cul-de-sac, along with the
intimations that a provisional middle ground can be found
and occupied constitutes the unifying theme of Pynchon's
fiction. The postmodern secularity of this reading, however,
does violence to the complex religious dialectic that serves
as the fiction's metastructure."

Eddins, GP.14

"Margherita Erdmann can recognize Blicero as the
post-Newtonian Other who, like his predecessor V., has "no
humanity left in his eyes..." 

William M. Platter GP.38

Not how Eddins reads Blicero's eyes, the maps, the wolf, the
scream. 

Neither reading is convincing, but this Not because the
symbolism is in the eye of the beholder.

Alice: "The question is, Henry Adams."

Humpty Dumpty: "A rose is a rose is a rose...."

Alice: "We're painting the roses red." 

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America. New York: Atheneum, 1961.
Eco, Umberto. "Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable."
Postscript to the Name of the Rose. New York: HBJ, 1984.

Lecture 4. Leslie Fiedler's Theory of American Literature
(from Love and  Death in the American Novel [1960]) 

The thesis: that, at its core, American literature
represents a flight from women; that in many of our most 
essential works we find, again and again, men fleeing from
the often intimidating and restrictive  influence of women
toward the freedom of the wilderness, where they establish a
"homoerotic" bond  (take note: this is not the same thing as
"homosexual"; the word refers to the sort of extraordinary 
friendship we see, for example, among male athletes) with a
non-white/non-civilized "other." 


http://www.mtsu.edu/~english/221/Syllabus/221OnlineLectures.html#Introductory
Lecture


The literary marketplace has always had three essential
elements: authorship, publishing and audience. Each of these
has been shaped by market forces from the very beginning,
and each in its own
way has mirrored the successive phases of Western capitalism
-- pre-industrial/pre-modern, industrial/modern and, in the
last fifty years,
post-industrial and postmodern. Our immediate concern is
with the literary marketplace in the last of these phases,
but as we consider how that market has changed since World
War II, it will be important to keep in mind that at least
some of its features are perennial. 

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/book.market-2.html

After the Great Divide  By Andreas Huyssen 

http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-20399-6tc.html

In American literature there is no more thoroughgoing or
systematic correlation of
the postwar technological environment and distributed
patterns of mental activity
than Pynchon's novel of 1973, Gravity's Rainbow.

http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/wip/jt.html

McHale goes on to discuss John Barth's theory (or theories:
one of a literature of exhaustion and one of a literature of
replenishment) of 'late modernism' in
relation to Borges, Calvino, and Nabokov. 

http://www.hku.hk/english/course/03354/introma2.htm

As recently as the 1960s, historians and social theorists
insisted that modernization and secularization were
inseparable. In addition to the shift of social, political,
and economic power from church to state, advances in modern
science and technology led to the gradual disenchantment of
the world and experience in it. In the mechanistic  universe
defined by Descartes and described in encyclopedic detail by
Enlightenment philosophers, there seemed to be little room
for either divinity or things divine. With the supernatural
in full retreat, God first withdrew to a deistic heaven to
watch His creation from afar and then seemed to disappear
from the lives of His erstwhile followers. From this point
of view, as modernity waxes, religion seems to wane.  But
matters are considerably more complex than this
unidirectional line of historical development suggests. 

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/791572.html#excerpt


"The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Reflections on Modern
Culture, Language and Literature."
American Scholar (Summer 1963), 32(3): 463-484.

"The Futility Corner." Review of Thomas Pynchon's V.
Saturday Review (March 23,1963), 46(12): 44. 

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~eyeghiay/hassan/index.html

The world described by classical dynamics was for many
easily compared to a clock
in which the regular patterns of behavior could be
understood and were, accordingly, quite predictable. Chaos
theory argues that most of the physical world is not like a
clock: to use Karl Popper's famous phrase, there are more
clouds than clocks in the world. The great complexity
evident in the various systems that constitute the world --
on all levels, from the very small to the very large -- are
so sensitive to circumstance that they are intrinsically
unpredictable. Polkinghorne thinks that term "chaos" is
unfortunate because the apparent haphazardness does occur
within restricted domains of possibility. "The most obvious
thing to say about chaotic systems is that they are
intrinsically unpredictable. Their exquisite sensitivity
means that we can never know enough to be able to predict
with any long-term reliability how they will behave."(9)
Polkinghorne argues that the epistemological limitations
which chaos theory presents point to a fundamental feature
of the world, what he calls an "ontological openness." 
I want to say that the physical world is open in its
process, that the future is not just a tautologous
spelling-out of what was already implicit in the past, but
there is genuine novelty, genuine becoming, in the history
of the universe. . . . The dead hand of the Laplacean
Calculator is relaxed and there is scope for forms of
causality other than the energetic transactions of current
physical theory. As we shall see there is room for the
operation of holistic organizing principles (presently
unknown to us, but in principle open to scientific
discernment), for
human intentionality, and for divine providential
interaction. The character of such
influence is perhaps best conceived as 'active
information,'(10) the creation of novel
forms carried by a flexible material substrate.(11)  Thus
chaos theory presents us with the possibility of "a
metaphysically attractive option of openness, a causal grid
from below which delineates an envelope of possibility (it
is not the case that anything can happen but many things
can), within which there remains room for manoeuvre."(12)


http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti98/carroll.htm