This article further inspects the Rocket and Schwarzgerat at the center of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1974). Though scholars commonly employ the Rocket as a metaphor and symbol by which they analyze plot and characters, I inverse this approach to see what the plot and characters can reveal about the Rocket qua Rocket. Drawing from Object-Oriented Ontology—specifically Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” or an entity that is dispersed through time and space—I claim that the Rocket functions as a hyperobject. The tendency of scholars to avoid a claim of reality towards the Rocket, I argue, is an echo of Western philosophy’s long valorization of the epistemological over the ontological that parallels unavailability with unreality. A reading the Rocket as hyperobject reveals a plot of ontological uncertainty unfolding in the characters’ search for inherently recessive entities.

Book review of Scott McClintock and John Miller (eds), Pynchon’s California (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2014).

Book review of Review of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester University Press, 2013). Review of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester University Press, 2013) George William Twigg Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor’s book is a welcome addition to Manchester University Press’s ‘Contemporary American and Canadian Writers’ series. Previous entries in the series include such complex, experimental authors as Paul Auster and Mark Z. Danielewski, amongst whom Pynchon is in good company. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to discussing exactly how we may ‘read’ Pynchon’s difficult, allusive style. The series editors’ foreword states that ‘[c]entral to the series is a concern that each book should argue a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey’, and while we may wonder whether any book on Pynchon’s vast, complex fictional world can truly be more than an ‘introduction’, Malpas and Taylor are indeed stimulating. Their study provides a clear, lucid discussion of several key themes in Pynchon’s novels, chief amongst which are paranoia, the emancipatory power of fantasy and alternative modes of perception, and the ‘subjunctive potentiality’ (3) of spaces of resistance. Malpas and Taylor’s analysis is always illuminating, and their analysis of space in particular ensures that their book is a significant contribution to the diffuse field of Pynchon scholarship. Chapter One focuses on three of the stories published in Slow Learner. ‘Low-lands’ is placed in its historical and cultural context, with incisive readings of 1950s cultural critiques by figures such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills, who argued that ‘[t]he success of American capitalism had led[...]to the occlusion of dissenting voices from debates about national identity’ (14). Characteristically of their book, Malpas and Taylor examine space, warning that the apparent promise in ‘Low-lands’ of ‘a renewed privatised space and a reconstituted individuality’ (15) may be illusory, as the story’s ending suggests. ‘The Secret Integration’ is read in conjunction with Pynchon’s article ‘A Journey Into the Mind of Watts’, with the authors sensitively charting the disparities between white and black experiences of Copyright © 2015, George William Twigg License (open-access): This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The citation of this article must include: the name(s) of the authors, the name of the journal, the full URL of the article (in a hyperlinked format if distributed online) and the DOI number of the article. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v1.2.128 2 Review of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester University

Book review of Evans Lansing Smith, Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld, Modern American Literature: New Approaches vol. 62 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012)

Review of Maniez, Claire, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, and Frederic Dumas, eds., Science and American Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From Henry Adams to John Adams (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)

Readings of Thomas Pynchon's novels are central to Brian McHale's theorization of the difference between modernist and postmodernist writing. McHale's argument that the difference resides in a shift from an 'epistemological dominant' to an 'ontological dominant' is, conversely, the foundation of his understanding of Pynchon. However, his reading of Against the Day , which suggests that the novel's use of multiple 'genre mirrors' aims to represent historical 'truth', sits uneasily within this literary-historical narrative. This essay argues that since for McHale postmodernism's ontological plurality ultimately refers back to discursive plurality, there is in fact no contradiction here. It further argues that Pynchon's project of pluralizing what McHale calls 'novelistic ontology' is no longer synonymous with 'de-conditioning' modernist readers: Pynchon's readers have either long since surrendered modernist modes of reading, or are postmodern natives who never practised them in the first place.

Gravity is a prominent physical concept in Gravity's Rainbow , as already announced by the novel's title. If the second part of the title – the poetic image of the rainbow – is bound up with mathematical formulas and the parabolic path of the Rocket, so conversely, this paper argues, Pynchon's novel introduces a relation between gravity and fiction. The paper explores Gravity's Rainbow' s use of the changing historical understandings of gravitation from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries by examining the novel's illustration of Newton and Leibniz's opposed concepts as well as its references to gravity as understood in Einstein's theory of relativity. When tracing the notions of gravity as force, fictitious force, and frame of reference, a particular focus lies on the relation of physical imagery to ethical questions and on the way Gravity's Rainbow provides a physico-ethical explanation of Slothrop's disappearance from the novel.

Although there is no explicit comparison in Mason & Dixon of the astronomer protagonist Charles Mason to the eponymous hero of Shakespeare's masterpiece, indisputable references to the play are to be found in the novel. Mason is endowed with qualities which mirror Hamlet's virtues and vices: he is a leader and a man of education and wit, though his metaphysical longings entice him towards madness and suicide. He is emburdened with a deep melancholy stemming from bereavement, loss of love, the hauntings of a ghost, indecision, even cowardice and frustrated ambition.