Distorted Transmissions. Towards a Material Reading of Thomas Pynchon'sThe Crying of Lot 49

Drawing on various theories of the materiality and mediality of literature, the essay argues that a focus on the material history of any given literary work can provide a more nuanced understanding of various literary historical processes than traditional textual analysis. Taking different physical editions of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as its starting point, the essay traces the constantly evolving exchanges between the progressive material incarnations of Pynchon's novel and the cultural context, laying bare some of the complex literary historical, cultural, and institutional processes that contributed to the canonization of The Crying of Lot 49.