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E-book Pynchon’s Sound of Music

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Penilaian

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When Penguin announced the upcoming release of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice in 2009, they heightened the suspense with two marketing gimmicks. One was a series of short movie trailers with Pynchon providing Doc Sportello’s slurred voice. The other one was a playlist of songs that would be mentioned in the novel. The choice of media was fitting since film and music, as readers of Pynchon have long noticed, provide the two most con-sistently important cultural reference systems for his characters. Music and movie references—much more accessible to the aver-age Pynchon reader than, say, mathematical concepts or the fine points of rocket engineering—have long invited fans and scholars alike to chip in with their insights and interpretations, some of it wild and fascinating speculation, some of it carefully constructed criticism. Kathryn Hume and Thomas J. Knight, for instance, find signifi-cance in “the fact that the two art forms he refers to most fre-quently are music and cinema, the two that order and manipulate our relationship with the flow of time” (“Orchestration” 381). So does literature, one might add, but literature works with a differ-ent conception of time, one that allows the reader to apprehend the work of art at his or her own pace. In 1980, David Cowart noted that a first wave of reception and interpretation of Pyn-chon’s work focused on scientific allusions and references, most notably the concept of entropy, rather than references to the arts. He corrected this bias with his book Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion in which he dedicated a chapter each to painting, film, music, and literature. The underlying message of the pictorial and film allusions, according to Cowart, was that “beyond life lies nothing more substantial than a blank white screen, a Void” (9). He observed a similarly bleak picture for the early reception that focused on entropy. He contrasted this with the musical (and lit-erary) allusions: “The musical references seem always to hint at the extra dimensions of experience that we miss because of the narrow range of frequencies—physical or spiritual—to which we are attuned” (9). This pronouncement appears valid, particularly for the first three novels and for Cowart’s focus on more erudite, that is, classical and new classical music. Since the early 1980s, excellent contributions have been made on various aspects of music in Pynchon’s work but none of them exceeded the length of an article or a book chapter. John Joseph Hess voices a common sentiment when he writes: “[I]n spite of these important critical accounts of what music Pynchon has used and how he used it, music has remained strangely undertheorized in Pynchon criticism” (2).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

780.72 HAN p

Penerbit

Switzerland : DIAPHANES., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

320 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783035802337

Klasifikasi

780.72

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Musicology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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