Theory, methodology and Pynchon

what matter who's speaking?

pp. 1-13

in: Paul M. Eve, Pynchon and philosophy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

The writings of Thomas Pynchon have spawned more critical commentary than almost any other American author of the last fifty years. Pynchon's texts are perhaps most famed for their "difficulty and apparent unfriendliness", as works that require, as Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale put it, "a collective enterprise of reading wherein none of us could succeed without the help of the others".¹ Among the interpretative toolkits that come in for a hard time in Pynchon's writing, though, perhaps none are so disparaged and under-attempted as those of philosophy and theory.