Presenter(s): Sam Beeker − English, Comparative Literature
Faculty Mentor(s): Brendan O’Kelly
Oral Session 1SW
Research Area: Humanities
Funding: I have been supported through the Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship (HURF), and have received a mini-grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.
Paranoia is generally pathologized as an unproductive condition. Yet, this pathologization is what constitutes it as a trope within postmodern literature, the most quintessential example of this being Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49. With my research, I pose questions about selfhood and paranoia by reading the aforementioned novel, drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorizations of paranoid knowing and reparative reading. Specifically, I construct a reparative reading of paranoia itself, as a site of meaning-making and knowledge production within postmodern literary forms and landscapes. My theorization of paranoia within the novel is seen through a spatio-political lens that seeks to recognize how spatial arrangements within Pynchon’s writing of the California landscape allow for potentially restrictive and finite sets of actions that may be deemed paranoid within politically discursive paradigms, such as the 1960s. Utilizing findings from research conducted at UC Berkeley, UT Austin, and the University of Oregon, my research generates a reading of the novel alongside its historical, political, and theoretical contexts to better understand paranoia as a product of the regionally specific environmental conditions within Pynchon’s representation of California. Paranoia here is seen as immanent to the identity formation of the postmodern subject, whose environmental conditions are what inform its available actions within that environment and the ways those actions are labeled and identified. During a time in which paranoia and identity play a complicated role in our troubling contemporary political environment, my reading of the novel seeks to propose alternative epistemological strategies for navigating the discourses pertaining to paranoid identities and the consequences that arise from the labeling of those identities as such. My reparative definition of the paranoid subject may prove useful for navigating the politics of despair that inform both contemporary understandings of postmodern subjectivity and those of the 1960s.