Things Fall Apart in the Well of Lost Plots... Stories... Clues... Signs… Symbols... Meanings: A Philosophical Formalist Hermeneutic on Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49”

Authors

  • Alvin Servaña *

    Department of Philosophy, De la Salle University, Manila 1004, Philippines

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.55121/prr.v2i2.467

Keywords:

Philosophical Formalism, Philosophy in Literature, Postmodern Novel, Critical Studies, Contemporary Criticism, Cultural Criticism

Abstract

Using Philosophical Formalism, I am executing a close textual examination of Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” as a “postmodern” novel. By looking into the implications of genre and/into the supposed self-aware critico-novelistic vision of Pynchon, I cascaded this critique as follows: Part 1: the semiotic/semiological texture of the novel; Part 2: the novel as a critical attempt to the Enlightenment-infused concepts in the contemporary time-space reality; Part 3: the novel as a psychedelic commentary on the modernist psychosis, thus a celebration and an interrogation of the legacies (?) of the intricacies or the lack thereof of the Postmodern cultural mood; for better or worse. What we can gleaned from this novel as a signifying practice of the Postmodern turn is something that is open to interpretations that I wish to consolidate and bring forth to the discourse—(con-)current to the issues that hover the Subject—elsewhere.

References

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Vol. 2 No. 2 (August 2025): In Progress

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