New book on Pynchon just out

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Dr John M. Krafft:

          Sam Thomas, of Malta Conference fame, has just had 
          his book Pynchon and the Political published by Routledge. 
          I haven't read it yet, but it's on order, and I'm looking 
          forward to it!

More info:

Pynchon and the Political
Author: Samuel Thomas
ISBN: 978-0-415-95646-8 (hardback) 978-0-203-93603-0 (electronic)

Summary

Thomas Pynchon's writing has been widely regarded as an exemplary form of 
postmodern fiction. It is characterized as genre-defying and enigmatic, as a 
series of complex and esoteric language games. This study attempts to 
demonstrate, however, that an oblique yet compelling sense of the "political" 
Pynchon disappers all too easily under the mantle of postmodernity. Innovative 
and unsettling discussions of freedom, war, labor, poverty, community, 
democracy, and totalitarianism are passed over in favor of constrictive 
scientific metaphors and theoretical play. Against this current, this study 
analyzes Pynchon's fiction in terms of its radical dimension, showing how it 
points to new directions in the relationship between the political and the 
aesthetic.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t780925724


>From Dr. Thomas' webpage:

I am currently in the process of finishing my first book, Pynchon and the 
Political, to be published by Routledge ('Major Literary Authors' series) in 
November 2007. Based on my doctoral thesis, this project is an exploration of 
resistance, governance and political legitimacy in the novels of Thomas Pynchon. 
Using Frankfurt School critical theory as an interpretive framework 
(particularly Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin), the book attempts to 
re-evaluate the relationship between the political and the postmodern in 
Pynchon's writing.

In addition to this, I have an article appearing in a forthcoming edition of The 
Pynchon Notes (ed. Vaska Tumir and John Krafft) entitled "Blank Cheques: Economy 
and Invisibility in Mason & Dixon". Estimated publication date: February 2007.
I recently completed 28 entries in the popular collection 1001 Novels You Must 
Read Before You Die for Quintet (ed. Peter Boxall, 2006) and am currently 
working on a new article on Balkan cinema that explores the ideologies of 
multiculturalism and nationalism through the work of Slavoj Zizek. Provisional 
title: "Zizek vs. Zizek: Film, Balkanism and the Poetics of Ethnic Cleansing"

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/profile116534.html