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Oulipian Codes, Wittgensteinian Games, Borgesian Labyrinths: The Potential Literature Of Gravity’S Rainbow, Stephen Haines

Scholars Week

This intertextual analysis discusses the multimodal links between Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Borgesian metaphorical imagery and story structure, Oulipian mathematic and textual experiments, and Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy. This analysis also draws on the work of Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines in that it seeks to identify the ways in which a work such as Gravity’s Rainbow requires non-trivial engagement from readers, what Hayles calls “ergodic” engagement, thereby transcending many of the traditional conceptions and functional limitations of texts. The goal of this analysis is to attempt to demarcate Gravity’s Rainbow as a unique form of textual experiment, one both …