John M. Krafft: English 440

John M. Krafft Department of English

Major Writers: Thomas Pynchon

English 440G Spring 2004

John M. Krafft

Office: 558 Mosler Hall

Office Hours: Mon. 1:00– 2:00

Tue. 12:00–12:50 and 6:50–

Thu. 4:00– 5:15 and 6:50–

And by appointment

Office Phone: 785-3258

Home Phone: 868-2330 (Call me at home at any time for any reason.)

E-mail: krafftjm@muohio.edu

WWW: <http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm>

Thomas Pynchon (1937–) is often cited as the premier postmodern writer, as the greatest novelist since Faulkner, or Joyce, or Melville, and as the precursor of cyberpunk. Lyrical and slapstick, sophisticated and vulgar, profound and profane, exhilarating and disquieting, Pynchon's fiction invites the full range of literary and cultural studies--formal, linguistic, historical, narratological, psychoanalytic, reader-response, feminist, postcolonial, etc.

We will explore, interrogate and construct Pynchon's texts in relation to a variety of theoretical, critical and historical interests and projects. Pynchon's work solicits an array of critical approaches, welcomes all degrees of theoretical sophistication and engages many kinds of ideological commitment. You can even take an oppositional stance, say, to the idea of Pynchon as a major or canonical writer, or to the effects and implications of his race, class and gender. You might also use Pynchon as a foil in your work on another writer.

Texts: [1]

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Mason & Dixon (1997)

Slow Learner (1984)

V. (1963)

Vineland (1990)

I will provide handouts of the following short pieces, put them on electronic reserve, or both. Many (and more) are also online at <http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu>.

"The Deadly Sins/Sloth: Nearer, My Couch, to Thee" (1993)

Foreword to the Orwell-centennial edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four (2003)

introduction to the reissue of Jim Dodge's Stone Junction (1997)

"Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" (1984)

"A Journey into the Mind of Watts" (1966)

letter to Thomas F. Hirsch (1968)

"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (1959)

If you are curious about other introductions, a book recommendation, a book review, support notices, liner notes, a band interview, technical articles or juvenilia, just ask me.

Syllabus:

For class discussion to succeed, you will need to have completed reading each text by the time we begin discussing it, since you can hardly discuss intelligently what you haven't read in its entirety. My one practical concession is to break up Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon into their parts, but as I noted in the course announcement, I hope you will be re reading GR in particular by the time we get to it. We will focus on one part at a time, but we can't avoid looking ahead as well. So if you haven't already done so, try to complete at least a cursory first reading of Gravity's Rainbow as early as possible.

In case discussions overlap the dates of assigned readings below, please also bring the previous book or handout to a class in which we are scheduled to begin discussing a new work.

It appears now that we will not have time as a whole class for Vineland if we are to do anything like justice to Mason & Dixon , but you are welcome to read Vineland on your own and to make it the subject of your research or term project. Or we can make adjustments in the syllabus if necessary.

Tue. 1/13— Introduction to the course

Thu. 1/15— Introduction to Slow Learner , "Entropy" and "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"; "Under the Rose" also recommended

Tue. 1/20— The Crying of Lot 49

Thu. 1/22— CL cont.; first response paper due

Tue. 1/27— CL cont.

Thu. 1/29— V.

Tue. 2/ 3— V. cont.; second response paper due

Thu. 2/ 5— V. cont.

Tue. 2/10— "The Secret Integration," "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" and letter to Thomas F. Hirsch

Thu. 2/12— Gravity's Rainbow , Part 1

Tue. 2/17— Monday-Tuesday exchange: no class (Monday classes meet)

Thu. 2/19— GR Pt1 cont.

Tue. 2/24— GR Pt1 cont.; third response paper due

Thu. 2/26— tba

Tue. 3/ 2— Gravity's Rainbow , Part 2

Thu. 3/ 4— GR Pt2 cont.

Tue. 3/ 9— Gravity's Rainbow , Part 3

Thu. 3/11— GR Pt3 cont.; fourth response paper due

Week of 3/15–19— Spring break

Tue. 3/23— GR Pt3 cont.

Thu. 3/25— Gravity's Rainbow , Part 4

Tue. 3/30— GR Pt4 cont.; research papers due

Thu. 4/ 1— "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" "Sloth," Introduction to Stone Junction and Foreword to Nineteen Eighty-Four

Tue. 4/ 6— Mason & Dixon , Part 1

Thu. 4/ 8— M&D Pt1 cont.; fifth response paper due

Tue. 4/13— M&D Pt1 cont.

Thu. 4/15— Mason & Dixon , Part 2

Tue. 4/20— M&D Pt2 cont.

Thu. 4/22— M&D Pt2 cont.; sixth response paper due

Tue. 4/27— Mason & Dixon , Part 3

Thu. 4/29— Wrap-up

Finals week, 5/ 3– — Term projects due, day and time tba

Requirements:

1. Punctual completion of all assigned reading.

Again, you need to have completed reading each assignment by the time we begin discussing it.

2. Informed and thoughtful participation in class discussion.

To spur your preparation and participation, I ask you to submit a short interpretive question on the reading during each week that a response paper is not due. Turn in your question (word processed, not hand written) at the start of (usually Tuesday's) class. Please also send it to me in a simple e-mail message (that is, not as a file attachment) before class. These questions will not be graded individually but are important to your class participation, so be prepared to present your question to the class--possibly even at a subsequent meeting.

3. Satisfactory and punctual completion of all writing assignments: six 2-page response papers, a 5–7-page research paper (or a research presentation) and a 12–15-page term project.

You will turn in your papers by e-mail as attached Word (.doc) files. (I will return them as printouts.) Follow standard formatting guidelines as if you were handing in hard copy. That is, double space, leave a one-inch margin all around, and so on. Please put your name at the very top of any paper you send me (even if you also include your name in a header or footer), flush left, with no blank lines above it and with nothing else on that first line.

Papers must be well organized, adequately developed, coherent and substantially error-free in typography, spelling, grammar, mechanics and usage, and must be documented (notes and works-cited list) in correct form as appropriate. Poorly written work will be marked down accordingly.

Late work will be marked down one letter for every day it is late--unless, of course, we have reached an agreement about it ahead of time. If you have a problem with the due date of a paper, discuss it with me privately before the paper is due; we can almost certainly reach an understanding.

4. Regular and punctual attendance.

I'll be here, and I prefer to assume you are planning to be here (on time) too, not thinking of how many times you can be absent. If you know you must miss a class, let me know in advance, if only for courtesy's sake, since not getting in touch does send a message. Even illness is not an automatic excuse, especially if you don't call or e-mail me.

If you miss more than two classes (especially without notifying me), I may have to drop you from the course. (According to university policy, absence for certain religious observances is not an attendance issue as discussed here: see MUPIM 10.1.)

Grading:

Response papers: 25%

Research paper/presentation: 25%

Term project: 35%

Class participation: 15%

Papers:

1. I ask for six brief (approximately 2 pages each) response papers on topics of your choice, due on the dates noted on the syllabus. These papers can raise questions, wrestle with problems, identify significant issues or patterns, experiment with possible readings. Tentative as they may be, they should demonstrate careful reading and close engagement with the texts. To make your responses interesting and meaningful to other readers too, you should provide some specific textual evidence or basis for what you say instead of merely saying what you feel or think. That goes as well even for the problems you may have (and you don't have to have all the answers). Feel free to raise the issues or draw attention to the problems in class discussion before or after you write about them. In fact, you should have your papers with you in case I ask you to read from them to the class.

I will mark each response paper either credit or no-credit and convert the total credit to a letter-grade equivalent at the end of the term.

2. You may either write a short research paper (5–7 pages) or make a presentation to the class (20-25 minutes) based on your research into a relevant topic or critical theory such as entropy, Southwest African genocide, chemical cartels, rocketry-film-calculus, astronomy, pre-Revolutionary American politics, historiographic metafiction, feminism, narratology or discourse analysis. If you make a presentation, you will want to provide some sort of documentary support--for instance, a handout including an outline, illustrations, a bibliography, and so on. March 30 is the due date for research papers, unless we negotiate a different date. If you want to make a presentation instead, when you do it will depend on when your topic can be most relevant to class discussion.

Focus on a subject such as surrealism, or the Hereros, or the hollow earth, or feminist theory (those are just examples) that is important in Pynchon's fiction or important to understanding it. Pick a subject that, ideally, you are interested in and think others would be interested in if they knew more about it or realized how crucial it was to appreciating one or more of Pynchon's texts. Investigate and present your subject in its own right, and show how it relates to Pynchon. Although there is no right or wrong about the exact proportions here, consider focusing mainly on the subject itself (explaining it, giving the history of it--if it is a subject with a history as such--and so on), as a way of providing readers with tools or resources they need, and then demonstrating some application to the fiction (one text, part of one text, or several texts). Of course, you might want to arouse interest by starting with the application and then turn to filling in the broader technical, historical or theoretical details beyond the fiction. Your purpose is to illuminate the fiction, make it more meaningful, for readers who haven't done the research you have but can benefit from your having done it. If you do a research presentation instead of a paper, your topic should be clearly relevant to the text we are discussing at the time.

3. You will write a seminar paper or term project of 12–15 pages. It may, but need not, grow out of either a response-paper topic or your research topic. For instance, you could do a research paper on feminism that was mostly about feminist politics or literary theory, but with some attention to Pynchon, suggesting the relevance of feminism to his fiction. Then the term project could be a full-dress application of the theory to the fiction, illuminating it, critiquing it, or the like.

Term projects necessarily involve a research component so you will know what else has been written about your subject; but they are likely to focus more directly than research projects on the fiction itself. They are opportunities to do some practical criticism or applied theory.

Term projects must have some discernable connection to Pynchon, but they can address "Pynchon and," even with the emphasis on "and."

4. I will be happy to discuss possible topics for your papers at any time, in person or by phone or e-mail. Indeed, I expect to consult with you about your research and term projects well in advance. Please be sure you have my approval for a topic and approach before you go too far.

5. Little of our language and few of our ideas can ever be entirely original; but there are uses of other people's words, ideas and findings that we are ethically obliged to acknowledge. When you do research and your work is influenced by it (if you quote, paraphrase, summarize or borrow information or ideas--and this goes even for the discussions in textbooks and reference works), you must acknowledge your intellectual debts, explicitly in the body of your essay, in notes, and/or in a works-cited list. Otherwise, you may be guilty of plagiarism. Formal research is only an example; you can incur the same obligation informally by reading the newspaper or surfing the Net. So even if you think you already know what plagiarism is, see The Miami Bulletin: The Student Handbook (available in hard copy, or online <http://www.muohio.edu/univpubs/handbook/acadregspV.html>) on the meaning and consequences of academic misconduct. Plagiarism is among the most serious, most contemptible, most intolerable of academic offenses. Don't risk it. Carefully document your references to the literature you write about and to any historical, cultural, critical or other sources you use in MLA style.

E-Mailing Papers:

E-mail your papers to me as attached Word (.doc) files. Don't cut-and-paste or type them directly into e-mail messages, or send files in other formats-- Works (.wps), for example--since I might not be able to open them. That doesn't mean you have to use Word to create your files; most word processing programs let you save in other formats. If you don't use Word , when you are ready to send me a file, use the "Save as" function (accessible from the File menu) to save a copy in Word format.

The "Save as" function also gives you the opportunity to change your file's name. Change it from whatever you called it as you worked on it to a file name consisting of 1) your last name, and 2) the identifying tag "term" or "research" or "response x ," depending on whether you are sending me your final term project, your research paper or a response paper. Notes: a) Omit the quotation marks around the tag words specified in the previous sentence; b) in the case of a response paper, substitute the number of the response-paper assignment for the x ; c) your word processor will almost certainly add .doc to the file name. File names should look like this: krafft term.doc; krafft research.doc; krafft response3.doc. Send me files with names constructed on that model only. (If two or more students have the same last name, they should use their MUNet user IDs instead as the first element in their file names.)

I ask you to follow that file-naming scheme for my convenience and protection. To avoid confusion and the risk of viruses, I will delete files I can't immediately identify by the sender's last name, including files with descriptive names like "English paper," "Seminar project," "Pynchon essay" or "Images of Women in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon: A Developmental Survey, by Ebenezer Cooke." So for your protection, always follow the instructions above.

Further Points About E-Mail:

1. Even if you don't ordinarily use or don't plan to use your Miami e-mail account, please be sure it is set up, since your Miami address is the one I will use when I need to e-mail you. If you would rather use a non-Miami e-mail service (AOL or Hotmail, for instance), configure your entry in the university directory (PHonebook <http://www.muohio.edu/ph>) so any mail sent to your Miami address will be forwarded to the address you prefer. I can reply to a message from any address, but please do not ask me to initiate a message to you at a non-Miami address.

2. Set your mail program to display your real name, not just your e-mail address, in messages you send. (In Eudora , go to Tools, to Options, to Getting Started, to Real Name; in SquirrelMail , go to Options, to Personal Information, to Full Name. [ Endymion does not have a real-name feature.] If you use a different mail program or service, learn and follow its procedure for displaying your real name.) Your real name makes your mail instantly recognizable. If you would rather be Peggy Jones than Margaret Jones, or Bob Smith than Robert Smith, that's fine; but if you write as Pinky or The Hulk or eagle273 or your mother's boyfriend, I won't know who you are and may not think finding out is urgent.

3. Check your e-mail regularly.

4. We are all already subscribed to a listserve list (eng440a@majordomo.ham.muohio.edu) for class-related discussion. It is a convenience for those who want to use it, but no one is required to post to it. I may post announcements, modifications to assignments, readings or the like. And I may occasionally ask permission to post, or ask the writer to post, an especially provocative interpretive question or response paper.

Final Note:

If you carry a pager or a phone, please turn it off (don't just set it to vibrate) before class begins.

Books on Reserve

I have put some of the better Pynchon criticism (though the essay collections are, in fact, quite uneven) on reserve. I have left many books off the list, some because they may be less immediately accessible or useful than others, and some because they seem hardly worth your bothering with at all. But don't let my judgment stop you from exploring whatever you think may help you. I have not put individual critical essays on reserve because the selected bibliography I started to prepare quickly got out of bounds, threatening to turn the course into one on Pynchon criticism instead of Pynchon. If you want to explore the criticism further, Mead's bibliography and the current bibliographies in Pynchon Notes are good places to start. Once you have an idea about what you might want to look at, I'll be happy to give you the benefit of my prejudices.

Abbas, Niran, ed. Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins . Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003.

Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Bérubé, Michael. Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Bianchi, Petra, Arnold Cassola and Peter Serracino Inglott. Pynchon Malta and Wittgenstein . Msida: Malta U Pub., 1995.

Carter, Dale. The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State . London: Verso, 1988.

Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.

Copestake, Ian D., ed. American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon . Bern: Peter Lang, 2003.

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion . Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980.

Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power . New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Green, Geoffrey, Donald J. Greiner and Larry McCaffery, eds. The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel . Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994.

Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon . Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.

Horvath, Brooke and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000.

Kolbuszewska, Zofia. The Poetics of Chronotope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon . Lublin: Learned Society of the Catholic U of Lublin, 2000.

Levine, George and David Leverenz, eds. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon . Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

Mangen, Anne and Rolf Gaasland, eds. Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon . Oslo: NOVUS, 2002.

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism . New York: Routledge, 1992.

McHoul, Alec and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Mead, Clifford. Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials . Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1989.

Medoro, Dana. The Bleeding of America: Menstruation as Symbolic Economy in Pynchon, Faulkner, and Morrison . Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

Mendelson, Edward, ed. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978.

O'Donnell, Patrick, ed. New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Oklahoma City University Law Review 24.3 (1999). Special issue, Thomas Pynchon and the Law , ed. Shubha Ghosh. [In fact, not on reserve, but online: go to MiamiLINK and click successively on Indexes & Databases / Law / Lexis-Nexis Legal Research / Legal Reviews; at the search menu, type <Pynchon> on the keyword line, the full title <Oklahoma City University Law Review> on the narrow-search line, and finally, set the date limit to Previous Five Years.]

Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981.

Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel . Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988.

[1] It should go without saying that you will need a collegiate dictionary and an up-to-date English handbook or style manual (such as the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers ) with a section on documentation.

This document was last modified on January 13, 2004, by jmk.