Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

For many years I have wanted to write about the inside of an institution--not a description of buildings and plans, of acres and occupations, but of the underlying spirit. Here is a little community with its vocations and avocations, its business and pleasures. It is not a place of gloom and sadness. It is a cheerful little village whose inhabitants are the happiest in the world. Those whose minds have not developed normally grow up physically but retain their childish faith and confidence. They have no complex problems to solve. They are not concerned with the serious task of making a living. Their wants are anticipated and their comforts are provided; why should they not be happy? But to many people the word "Institution" means repression or punishment. As a matter of fact, it is a place of expression and encouragement. And, so that I may feel that I am writing in a personal way, I have chosen a mythical friend named Robinson, and I am supposing that he is beginning his career as the superintendent of an institution. I am trying to give him the "feel" of things, hoping all of the time that the lessons of life that we daily learn in dealing with our boys and girls, the innocents of the world, may be of help to anyone who has to live in the great rushing, striving world just outside our doors.

Training School at Vineland (Vineland, N.J.)

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon's return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity's Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon's writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon's offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon's harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. --- Pynchon, Thomas --- Criticism and interpretation.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Now available in paperback, this is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America's engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon's career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon's relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon's complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.

Pynchon, Thomas --- Criticism and interpretation --- Pinchon, Tomas --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Pynchon, Thomas. --- Literature --- Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General --- Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers --- Against the Day. --- American postmodernity. --- Gravity's Rainbow. --- Mason &Dixon. --- Slow Learner. --- The Crying of Lot 49. --- The Secret Integration Entropy. --- Thomas Pynchon. --- United States' political history. --- Vineland. --- aporia. --- constraint. --- eighteenth-century colonial culture. --- forms of relationship. --- freedom. --- modernism. --- paranoid sensibility.