New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49

[Dave Monroe]

O'Donnell, Patrick, ed.   New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49.
   New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, is widely recognized as
a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and
the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of
the fifties and sixties in America. In the introduction to this
collection of original essays, Patrick O’Donnell discusses the
background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five
experts on contemporary literature examine: the novel’s ‘semiotic
regime’ or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of
postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American writer, Jorge
Luis Borges; metaphor in the novel; the novel’s narrative strategies;
and the novel within the cultural contexts of American Puritanism and
the Beat movement. Together, these essays provide an examination of
the novel within its literary, historical, and scientific contexts.

Contents
Series editor’s preface; 1. Introduction Patrick O’Donnell; 2. Borges
and Pynchon: the tenuous symmetries of art Debra A. Castillo; 3.
Toward the schizo-text: paranoia as semiotic regime in The Crying of
Lot John Johnston; 4. ‘Hushing sick transmissions’: disrupting story
in The Crying of Lot Bernard Duyfhuizen; 5. ‘A metaphor of od knew how
many parts’: the engine that drives The Crying of Lot N. Katherine
Hayles; 6. A re-cognition of her errand into the wilderness
Pierre-Yves Petillon; Selected bibliography.

Contributors
Patrick O’Donnell, Debra A. Castillo, John Johnston, Bernard
Duyfhuizen, N. Katherine Hayles, Pierre-Yves Petillon

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521388333

New essays on The crying of lot 49
By Patrick O'Donnell
Published by Cambridge University Press, 1991
ISBN 0521388333, 9780521388337
174 pages

http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC