Abstract
This book explores some of the ways in which contemporary literary theory can be used to read fiction. In particular, it focuses on Thomas Pynchon's three novels to date and his collection of early stories. The theories exploited are concentrated in the work of Jacques Derrida
which has been variously labelled deconstructive or more recently grammatological. The boundaries between biography, criticism and fiction are challenged to such an extent that the gentre of the text itself is part of the game that its readers are invited to play. Alec McHoul also wrote Telling How Texts Talk: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology and Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science. David Wills has also written Self De(con)struct: Writing and the Surrealist Text and also Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory together with Peter Brunette.