About Yuanrui Xu

Midwest Modern Language Association 2026

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

“In the Shady Margin: The Uncooperative Detective and the Unarchivable in Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket.” To be presented in November, 2026.

Hicks McTaggart, the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon’s latest work Shadow Ticket, is a private investigator who is reputed for having clients “living at the edge of desperation” and is “long flagged by the police at all levels as Uncooperative.” In Milwaukee 1932, with the Great Depression in full swing and the Nazis gaining power, Hicks is reluctantly dispatched to track down the runaway heiress of a cheese enterprise, but accidentally finds himself entangled with a range of institutions including the Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies as well as underground artists, gangsters, and outlaws. Caught in a typical Pynchonian detective detour, Hicks navigates between the archival historical events and its ungovernable remainder.

This paper reads Hicks as a detective who undermines the genre’s archival logic – the faith that truth can be uncovered and order restored – with his case opening outward into chaos rather than closing into solution. In the end, when facing the two fates available to him, returning to America and restoring a “normal” life, or remaining in Europe as those around him are “one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the uncoverable,” Hicks chooses to stay, not as a hero, but as a reluctant witness to what no archive will recover. Exploring the shady margin of the archive, Pynchon’s postmodern noir interrogates the ethics of witnessing the unarchivable, in a historical moment that, Pynchon reminds us, we have not yet finished living through.

College English Association 2026

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

“‘I’ll Be a Fugitive’: Oedipa Maas’s Anti-Oedipal Declaration in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Presented on March 27, 2026.

“I’ll be a fugitive.” This is Oedipa Maas’s anti-Oedipal manifesto in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, marking a crucial moment when she decides to run away from her shrink, her family, and the police, and continues her quest for the Trystero, an underground mail system that seems to dominate the other side of the society – a quest that is, as she clearly knows, an impossible journey. Whether intentionally allusive or humorously parodical, Thomas Pynchon urges us to answer the question: “Is Oedipa Oedipal?” While criticism on the character has extensively examined the mythological and psychoanalytical associations, often framing her quest as a paranoid attempt to solve an Oedipal riddle, I propose to bring schizoanalysis into the discussion and argue that Oedipa Maas functions as an anti-Oedipal subject, one who demonstrates a schizophrenic, ever-becoming subjectivity elucidated in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

This bold claim marks her transformation from a housewife living a changeless life in the suburbs to a fugitive fleeing from the territorializing forces. Instead of succumbing to cynical numbness or insanity like her husband and her shrink, or becoming a representative of capitalism like her quondam lover, Oedipa symbolizes a line of flight from the postmodern dilemma between the desire for graspable totality and the uncertainty that is constantly generating possibilities. Becoming a fugitive means to embark on an Oedipal quest of knowledge but also to escape the Oedipus myth and the family drama, to seek the fulfillment of desire while accepting its impossibility, and also to embrace the ongoing flow of becoming. Ultimately, by alluding to the Greek myth and reversing it, resorting to psychoanalysis and subverting it, Pynchon renders Oedipa anti-Oedipal, and thus provides a possible solution for postmodern subjects: to be Oedipa Maas, to be something more than Oedipus.

Nanjing University Foreign Language and Literature Graduate Forum 2023

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 06:00:00 -0400

“Traversing Fantasy: An Event of Subjectivity.” Presented on Aug 15, 2023.

Imagine walking through the long underwater corridor of an aquarium. Above you is the transparent glass arcade and fish swim past overhead. You know this is not the real ocean, and in truth, something in you recoils from such an experience being “real.” The glass protects you from drowning, from sharks, from the danger that lurks in the sea and therefore conjures a safe viewing space, an illusion so vivid that it can provoke genuine awe, even fear. The eventness of this experience, however, does not arrive when you first step into the aquarium, nor in the shock of its vividness, nor in the lingering wonder after you exit, but arrives at a subtler moment of recognition – that the glass arcade in a sense does not make your experience “less real,” because the way the aquarium functions is how we are living in the world.

That vitreous protection could be regarded as a materialized metaphor of fantasy, a significant concept in psychoanalysis that both reveals the constructedness of reality and sustains subjectivity as a structural defense against the Real. Meanwhile the Real remains irreducible, as we cannot shatter the glass and swim among the fish, just as the deep sea and the desert mark the outer limits of our reach. But this impossibility is not a defeat. According to Jacques Lacan, what marks the success of psychoanalytic therapies is the reconstruction of the analysand’s fantasies by the analyst, which enables the subject to traverse the fantasy. Slavoj Zizek further points out that to traverse fantasy is not to destroy it or eliminate all the symptoms, but to see through its structuring illusion while remaining inside it. Out of this process a parallax view is formed, a new life is established, and traversing fantasy thereby becomes an event of subjectivity.