What Goes on Behind Mason and Dixon’s Backs in Pynchon’s Novel?
What Goes on Behind Mason and Dixon’s Backs in Pynchon’s Novel?

Summary/Abstract: The departure point of this article is the author’s opinion that every new encounter with a previously read text provides an occasion on which to re-think the act of reading, and to question disciplinary knowledge. After a brief description of his earlier reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which was focused on the issue of territoriality, the author begins his description of his latest encounter with the text by indicating the context in which it occurs, and concludes that in his first reception of the book he failed to note what he now recognizes as the novel’s core theme. Designating Pynchon’s economic thematics as that core, he analyzes it and shows how it produces a number of epiphanic moments in the text. In his conclusion, the author argues that the description of these epiphanic moments, or of what takes place behind the backs of Pynchon’s protagonists, can be articulated if one incorporates certain discursive procedures from Karl Marx’s writings into the analysis.

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