Abstract

This book presents thorough, comprehensive and previously unaddressed philosophical and ethical readings of Thomas Pynchon's fiction through Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno.

Thomas Pynchon, the most important living American author, is famed for his lengthy, complex and erudite fictions. Given these characteristics, an examination of the philosophical dimensions of Pynchon's works is long overdue. In this book I comprehensively and clearly redresses this balance, mapping Pynchon's interactions with the philosophy, ethics and politics of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in a fresh approach to these seminal novels.

Pynchon and Philosophy is based on the notion that Pynchon's brand of postmodern literature mocks theoretical frameworks. On these grounds, Pynchon has been accused of being an anti-rationalist, a postmodern nihilist figure who revels in the collapse of logic. In this book I show that a fruitful showdown between these philosophical figures and Pynchon is now urgently needed to unearth the latent ethics within Pynchon's novels and to counter these wild claims. In this work I cover all of Pynchon's novels to date and read the corresponding philosophy in detail through a variety of methodologies, while finally demonstrating that Pynchon's work cannot be considered without evaluating his ethics; an ethics that I show requires philosophy.