Sylabus
1 Introduction 2 Gravity's Rainbow: Part I: pp. 1-60 + Michael Davitt Bell's reading guide each week 3 Gravity's Rainbow: Part I: pp. 60-113 + Roland Barthes 4 Gravity's Rainbow: Part II: pp. 114-167 + Leo Bersani 5 Gravity's Rainbow: Part II: pp. 168-226 + Erik S. Roraback 6 Gravity's Rainbow: Part II: pp. 227-278 + Edward Mendelson 7 Gravity's Rainbow: Part III: pp. 279-336 + William Dawers 8 Gravity's Rainbow: Part III: pp. 337-433 + "Foreword" to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four 9 Gravity's Rainbow: Part III: pp. 433-504 + Eric Cassidy 10 Gravity's Rainbow: Part III: pp. 504-616 + Erik S.
Roraback 11 Gravity's Rainbow: Part IV: pp. 617-760 + Leo Bersani 12 Conclusions
Anotace
OBJECTIVES
This seminar explores one key work of twentieth-century prose fiction in English, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), probably the most complex and important text by the contemporary avant-garde American novelist-recluse Thomas Pynchon (1937- present). Critical and theoretical matter will also be enlisted in our collective enterprise of encountering Gravity's Rainbow, a text now seen as a paradigmatic late twentieth-century prose epic and novel. Emphasis will be placed on questions of what precisely are the diverse forms of culture illuminated through Gravity's Rainbow's modes of representation in regard to questions of aesthetics (including of aesthetic pleasure), of epistemology (i.e., of knowledge), of ethics (and so by extension of evil), and of ontology (i.e., of selfhood and of subjectivity). Moreover, the notion of ´modernity´ and of how it functions in, and is critiqued by, Pynchon´s novel, with the aid of various theoretical perspectives (baroque, Niklas Luhmann social systems theory, the Frankfurt School, Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and so on), will be pursued as an object of critical focus.