The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon

[Rich Clavey]

Any idea where we can get the full text?


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On Thu, 10/24/13, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon
 To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
 Date: Thursday, October 24, 2013, 4:35 PM
 
 The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and
 Thomas Pynchon: Postmodern
 Negotiations of Western Modernity
 
 MOSCH, MATTHIAS (2012) The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and
 Thomas
 Pynchon: Postmodern Negotiations of Western Modernity.
 Doctoral
 thesis, Durham University.
 
 Full text not available from this repository.
 Author-imposed embargo until 26 November 2016.
 
 Abstract
 
 This thesis examines the Faust myth in post-war American
 fiction,
 giving special consideration to works of William Gaddis and
 Thomas
 Pynchon.
 
 I present these works, which are underrepresented in broader
 studies
 of the literary tradition of the myth, as substantial
 contributions to
 the latter, while demonstrating how their thematic and
 stylistic
 proximity can be explained through their use of the myth
 itself. I
 thereby meet two desiderata: a location of Gaddis’s and
 Pynchon’s
 Faustiana in specific currents of twentieth-century
 intellectual
 history and a qualitative comparison between both authors
 against the
 background of postmodern mythography.
 
 Locating their works in the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von
 Goethe
 and Thomas Mann, I analyse how both authors employ the myth
 in order
 to satirise the underbelly of Western modernity. In turning
 the myth
 against the founding principles of America itself, they
 suggest that
 the vision of a New Eden has been a Faustian wager from the
 start. In
 doing so, they transform the image of the heretical
 soul-seller into
 that of a representative of the dominant forces of their
 time.
 Playfully demonising the reckless individualism, technicism,
 and
 voracious materialism of their contemporaries, they provide
 an
 astonishingly differentiated portrait of human
 self-aggrandisement
 that reverts into mechanisms of dehumanisation, a feat that
 is
 reflected in their manifest use of the works of Oswald
 Spengler, Max
 Weber, Eric Voegelin, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse.
 
 While Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s early novels remain a
 matter of negative
 theology in refraining from providing totalising suggestions
 as how to
 fare with the sold ‘soul’ of the West, I argue that
 these satirical
 disputes, via their use of apophaticism, indirection, and
 allusive
 complexity, convey a distinctly ethical message that speaks
 against
 the alleged nihilism and relativism of postmodern fiction.
 
 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5901/
 
 http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Faust_Myth_in_William_Gaddis_and_Tho.html?id=Kz_HmAEACAAJ
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