Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History

[Dave Monroe]

Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History
David Cowart

Page count: 224
Trim size: 6 x 9

Cloth
 List price: $59.95
 978-0-8203-4062-3
 1/15/2012

Paper
 List price: $24.95
 978-0-8203-4063-0
 1/15/2012

The work of an American master assessed fifty years after publication
of his first novel, V.

Reviews

"Soon it will be fifty years since the debut of Thomas Pynchon's award
winning first novel V., in 1963. During those decades this famous
writer has succeeded doggedly and amazingly in the task of secreting
himself and his private life from the public eye and has published six
more novels, a collection of short fiction, and various bits and
blurbs of prose. With that anniversary Pynchon will turn seventy-six.
The time is nigh, then, for critics to reckon with the body of his
work, its place in the history of American literature, and of the
novel. Cowart is certainly the one to do that work."
'
 —Steven Weisenburger, author of A Gravity's Rainbow Companion

 "With his 1980 Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, David Cowart
produced one of the earliest sustained scholarly studies of Pynchon's
fiction, and his work has remained among the best of its kind: not
only intelligent, learned, and sophisticated, but also graceful,
charming and accessible. Here he takes Pynchon's historical
imagination and projects as his central focus, understanding them as
integral to, not at odds with, Pynchon's manifest postmodernism. The
Pynchon he constructs is politically engaged and something of a
humanist, with a decidedly if ambiguously spiritual bent. To do
justice to all these facets of a complex author is quite an
achievement. This book is the real thing."

 —John M. Krafft, Miami University

Description

Thomas Pynchon helped pioneer the postmodern aesthetic. His formidable
body of work challenges readers to think and perceive in ways that
anticipate—with humor, insight, and cogency—much that has emerged in
the field of literary theory over the past few decades. For David
Cowart, Pynchon’s most profound teachings are about history—history as
myth, as rhetorical construct, as false consciousness, as prologue, as
mirror, and as seedbed of national and literary identities.

In one encyclopedic novel after another, Pynchon has reconceptualized
historical periods that he sees as culturally definitive. Examining
Pynchon’s entire body of work, Cowart offers an engaging,
metahistorical reading of V.; an exhaustive analysis of the influence
of German culture in Pynchon’s early work, with particular emphasis on
Gravity’s Rainbow; and a critical spectroscopy of those dark stars,
Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. He defends the California fictions
The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as roman fleuve
chronicling the decade in which the American tapestry began to
unravel. Cowart ends his study by considering Pynchon’s place in
literary history.

Cowart argues that Pynchon has always understood the facticity of
historical narrative and the historicity of storytelling—not to
mention the relations of both story and history to myth. Thomas
Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History offers a deft analysis of the
problems of history as engaged by our greatest living novelist and
argues for the continuity of Pynchon’s historical vision.

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/thomas_pynchon/