ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper aims to reread Thomas Pynchon’s V. from the perspective of new materialism, one of the new theoretical contributions of posthumanism. The debut novel by one of the leading postmodern American novelists has been well known for the consistent use of entropy and an early postmodern critique of humanism. A number of critics have read the novel mostly in terms of the reductionist view of entropy as well as the dehumanizing culture of the so-called inanimate objects. Meanwhile, this paper attempts to interpret V. as an excellent prophetic work of the posthuman future in which things live with and through human beings. For this purpose, at first, entropy is critically compared with negentropy, an alternative to it. Then, a few representative studies of new materialism, such as Bill Brown’s thing theory, Jane Bennett’s vitalist materialism, and Bruno Latour’s nonhuman theory, are outlined to elaborate on the new insights into matter or things and further the emerging relationships between human and nonhuman that the critics have overlooked so far. Hopefully, this new materialist rereading of V. would demonstrate how Pynchon’s novel opens the way for re-imagining the life in the kingdom of things and the human condition in the age of things that has been already pervaded.

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