It is tempting to read Thomas Pynchon's sprawling masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow-with its shell-shocked refugees fleeing across a missile-pocked, post-war landscape-as an eschatological text that plays out religious end-times scenarios. However, an invented citation from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas included as a chapter epigraph-"Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in hell today"-suggests that we should do otherwise. In grafting a playful fragment about Jesus, judgment, and hell onto Thomas, Pynchon parodies a common need to read eschatological themes back into non-eschatological texts. In doing so, he also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting his own book. Ultimately, Pynchon's own rocket-gospel is likewise a non-eschatological text. Like Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow stymies readers' efforts to derive a clear eschatology from it-or to read one back into it. In this essay, I contend that Pynchon enacts a number of strategies to keep his audience from reading classic end-times scenarios into his own work, all of which are prefigured by the Gospel of Thomas.
مجموعه
تاريخ نشر
2010
توصيف ظاهري
139-160
عنوان
Religion and the Arts
شماره جلد
14/1-2
شماره استاندارد بين المللي پياييندها
1568-5292
اصطلاحهای موضوعی کنترل نشده
اصطلاح موضوعی
apocalyptic literature
اصطلاح موضوعی
Art History
اصطلاح موضوعی
Comparative Religion & Religious Studies
اصطلاح موضوعی
eschatology
اصطلاح موضوعی
General
اصطلاح موضوعی
Gravity's Rainbow
اصطلاح موضوعی
History
اصطلاح موضوعی
Religious Studies
اصطلاح موضوعی
The Gospel of Thomas
اصطلاح موضوعی
Thomas Pynchon
نام شخص به منزله سر شناسه - (مسئولیت معنوی درجه اول )