Urban Sprawl and Existentialism in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v21i1.81Keywords:
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49Abstract
The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon’s profound commentary on existentialism and on America’s increasingly generic, brutal, and isolating urban landscape. Pynchon weighs both topics as he depicts the existential angst of a commodified, market-driven life filled with marketing jingles, unplanned sprawl as far as the eye can see, soulless subdivisions, endless freeways, and the resulting breakdown of community where people feel disconnected and alone and their lives seem empty and meaningless.
References
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Berressem, Hanjo. 1993. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Chambers, Judith. 1992. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Twain Publishing.
Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. 2000. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press.
Mailor, Norman. 1968. The Armies of the Night; History as a Novel, the Novel as History. New York: New American Library.
Plater, William. 1978. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Schaub, Thomas. 1988. “‘A Gentle Chill, An Ambiguity’: The Crying of Lot 49,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. Richard Pierce (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co).
Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: HarperCollins.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Websters Third International Dictionary. Springfield, Mass: Merriam-Webster, 1993.
Published
2014-07-21
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Prince, T. (2014). Urban Sprawl and Existentialism in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, 21(1), 81-91. https://doi.org/10.1558/eph.v21i1.81
