A Postmodernist Challenge to Imperialism

Abstract

Eunjung Park's Study on Thomas Pynchon: Empire and the Postmodern, the first critical book on Pynchon published in Korean, is remarkable for its systematic and comprehensive approach to Pynchon's postmodernist critique of imperialism. According to the author, Pynchon's concern with imperialism consistently pervades his novels. A Study on Thomas Pynchon begins with the paradoxical premise that America both denies and inherits European imperialism. With her keen criticism, Park explores how Pynchon's novels suggest that America reproduces and reinforces an ideology of imperialism in various forms rather than continuing to carry out what the founding fathers and their nineteenth-century heirs proclaimed against the evil force of British empire. What Pynchon points out through this paradox is relatively self-conscious: America itself has become an empire that increases entropy more and more.