Teaching Resources
Despina Kakoudaki
Study Questions for Thomas Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49
Comparative Literature 1B, Reading and Composition
GUIDELINES
The Crying of Lot 49 is a complicated text, and you may find it difficult to start thinking about a paper topic. Often in this book both ideas and events end up in completely unexpected directions, and things are the opposite of what they seem.
Remember that what you are trying to do in the paper is to:
1. propose an issue or question
2. explore it
3. use data (quotations from the text) for argumentation
4. think about the implications of what you are discussing
5. connect your thoughts, evidence and textual references in an essay that is persuasive and argumentative
6. have a conclusion
Here are some research possibilities for you.
1. Start looking through the novel again, and research the trajectory of one image/topic from the following list. Since this novel is saturated with information, you need to be selective. Not all the appearances or instances would be important for the development of your paper.
2. After you have a list of quotations on this image, try to figure out if there is a pattern, a development or a change in how the topic is represented in the text. Your research is textual--it has a lot to do with the connections between the actual words that are used in the passages. Your argumentation should focus a lot on this kind of analysis.
3. Here are some suggestions of topics you can research:
objects
secret societies
metaphors
cars
music
cities
popular culture
other countries
brandnames
time
movement
space
bars
drugs
punctuation
the play
stamps
images
tv--movies
other texts
fairytales
seeing
signs
crowd scenes
dance scenes
archives
religion
the body
war
the Nazis
the past
history
buses
freeways
name changes
acronyms
death
surface and depth
clothes
underwear
household objects
water
cleaning
psychoanalysis
4. Because this novel is "paranoid," soon you will notice that strange things (drugs and freeways) are combined in the text. Take notes of these coalitions of imagery, and include these possible directions in your outline.
5. At the end of this research process you should have an outline which includes a number of important quotations, and your ideas about how this topic or image affects the plot.
6. Bring this outline to class for our Paper Topics Workshop.