ENGL636, S II '04, M-F 1330-1445, ARM 119 :: Studies in an Author / Thomas Pynchon :: WVU Department of English
And "pynchonoid" moves out of the realm of this blog and my screen name in Pynchon-l. One requirement for the course:"Join Pynchon-L, the list for pynchonoids"
Ambitious reading list, too, although not quite as much as the absurd suggestion I once heard, that you have to read Finnegan's Wake in order to fully appreciate Gravity's Rainbow; it puts pynchonoid.org in nice company, that's for sure, warranted or not:
...thanks to Dave Monroe for bringing this to the attention of Pynchon-l.Partial List of Recommended Texts
(all at WVU Library; *=also at WVU Bookstore)
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, especially Chapters XXI, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV.
Aleida Assmann, "Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory," Representations #56, link (JSTOR)
Hanjo Berressem, Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text
Leo Bersani, "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature," Representation #25, link (JSTOR)
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
Charles Clerc, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon
Peter Cooper, Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World
David Cowart, "The Luddite Vision,"American Literature Vol. 71 #2, link (JSTOR)
Walter Dornberger, V2
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology
*Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon
*Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
C. G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol 9 of the Collected Works
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Vol 12 of the Collected Works
J. Kerry Grant, Companion to the Crying of Lot 49
Kathryn Hume, Pynchon's Mythography: an approach to Gravity's Rainbow
Friedrich Kittler, "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," in Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology, ed. Tabbi and Wutz
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: discursive time and countercultural desire in the work of Thomas Pynchon
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. Levine & Leverenz
Frank Palmieri, "Neither Literally nor as Metaphor: Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49 and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions," ELH Vol 54 #4, link (JSTOR)
I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex
William H. Plater, Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon
*Thomas Pynchon, V.
*Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
Rchard Sasuly, IG Farben
Lance Schachterle, "Information Entropy in Pynchon's Fiction," Configurations Vol 4 #2, link (Muse)
Gershom Sholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, especially part III
*Stephen Weisenburger, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel, (not in the library)
*Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, especially chapters I, II, V, XI
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History
George Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology
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