Thomas Pynchon’s novella, The Crying of Lot 49, traces the quest of housewife Oedipa Maas who was appointed by her ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity, to execute his will. In her journey, she finds herself unwittingly distracted and bombarded by the multifarious, befuddling and fragmentary signs relating...
Before receiving his ex’s will, Oedipa’s life, as an ordinary upper middle-class woman, is static and prosaic. The comic aspect of her character, for the most part, comes from this being ordinary and further unfolding of the plot. In addition to characters’ names which meanings...
Concerned with the fundamental question “What is man,” Mark Greif chronicles this line of inquiry in the American context from 1933 to 1973. The period, as he identifies as “midcentury,” witnesses the failure of Enlightenment values, the disbelief in humanity after two world wars, and...
Few commentaries on the novel are silent on the subject of Oedipa’s name. Most take for granted that it is significant in a straightforward way: by referring the reader to some extra-textual network of meanings the name appropriates some or all of those meanings for...
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