Journal ArticleDOI
Singing Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: Interfaces of Song, Narrative, and Sonic Performance
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In this paper, the authors examined the novel's acoustic background, pointing to the formal structure of songs and its role in locating singing human voices in opposition to noises emitted by technological devices such as V2 rockets.Abstract:
Thomas Pynchon’s interest in music is audibly reflected in the rich intertextual environments of his works such as Gravity’s Rainbow , a novel which includes numerous allusions to musical pieces, descriptions of performances, and song lyrics. The latter stand out from prose narrative as they introduce new diegetic dimensions to the novel by offering playful commentary on its plot and characters. The present study examines the novel’s acoustic background, pointing to the formal structure of songs and its role in locating singing human voices in opposition to noises emitted by technological devices such as V2 rockets. A classification scheme shows how Pynchon’s formal experimentation juxtaposes written and oral variants of language, thus connecting songs to one of the novel’s thematic centers — problematics of order. This function of songs is examined in an episode of Vaslav Tchitcherine’s mission of promoting literacy among oral tribes of Kazakhstan, that serves as a commentary on the conventional character of writing systems and their ability to transform the poetic quality of language into a systematic structure.read more
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MonographDOI
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939
TL;DR: A comprehensive survey and interpretation of the Soviet management of the nationalities question can be found in this article, which traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of dozens of official national languages, and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programs.
Book
Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey
TL;DR: The Nonhermeneutic/Presence: An Anecdotal Account of Epistemological Shifts as mentioned in this paper is an account of epistemological shifts in the history of the arts.
Book
Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose
Geoffrey Leech,Michael H. Short +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a method of analysis and some examples of levels of style, text style, and frequency in a novel, and discuss the relationship between text style and text content.