Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
Thomas Pynchon, perhaps 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 Pynchon and Philosophy, I comprehensively and clearly redress 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.
"Martin Paul Eve's Pynchon and Philosophy is a work of consummate scholarship. Breaking new ground in Pynchon studies, Eve offers an immensely erudite, detailed and in-depth account of the ways in which the ideas of Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno help us to think about his texts. A first-rate book." - David Cowart, University of South Carolina, USA