Simulacral A-Natural Culture in Thomas Pynchon’s Fictions

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Thomas Pynchon(1937- )’s novels contain a number of critiques of contemporary technocratic culture, which has brought about no less negative side-effects than benefits and advantages. Most relevant to this paper is the writer’s critique of simulacral culture, the kind of culture that the French postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929- ) finds prevalent in postmodern society. Drawing a connection between Baudrillard and Pynchon, this paper examines how nature, natural materials, and human nature become stripped of naturalness in the culture of artificiality and virtuality. Pynchon’s novels present various scenes in which the natural turns into the virtual or the artificial is recreated as a meticulously designed artificial environment; the dominance of car culture causes the degradation of nature to a mere backdrop for drivers; natural materials are replaced by synthetic polymers; human nature gets objectified, mechanized, and reified. All these phenomena can be interpreted as a warning against the possible loss of the natural as a result of the so-called postmodern “loss of the real” in contemporary technocratic and simulacral culture.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 "Understanding Thomas Pynchon" U of South Carolina P 1986

2 "The Vital Illusion" Columbia UP 2000

3 "The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1964." Oxford UP 2000

4 "The Illusion of the End" 19921994

5 "The Environmental Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Ecological Context" 42 (42): 59-72, 1998

6 "The Ecstasy of Communication" 19871988

7 "The Death of the Real in The Crying of Lot 49" 198719-26

8 "The Culture of Plasticity Observations on Contemporary Cultural Transformation" 205-28 18, 1983

9 "The Crying of Lot 49. 1966." Harper 1999

10 "Pleasures of the Immachination Transformations of the Inanimate in Durrell and Pynchon U or Missouri P" U or Missouri P 127-136, 1995

11 "Plastic and Catastrophe in Gravity’s Rainbow" 149-41 61, 1981

12 "Jean Baudrillard" Routledge 2000

13 "IG Farben and the War against Nature in Gravity’s Rainbow Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism Proceedings of the German-American Conference in Paderborn" 319-36, 19901990

14 "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign" 19721981

15 "Cool Memories II: 1987-1990. 1990." Duke UP 1996

16 "Beyond Paranoia and Fragmentation: The Crisis of the Individual and the Search for a Posthumanist Alternative in Thomas Pynchon’s V" 45 : 839-861, 1999

17 "A Companion to V." U of Georgia P 2001

18 ".Pynchon’s Poetics:Interfacing Theory and Text" U of Illinois P 1993

19 ""The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm." U of Georgia P 3-14, 1995