Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day: Adeleuzian Reading of Pynchon’s Language

his study explores Pynchon’s mammoth novel, Against the Day, in terms of the minor practice of language as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, which opens up new possibilities for literary criticism. With his idiosyncratic, intensive, and inventive practice of language, Pynchon shatters the already existing notions of appropriate and homogenizing forms of major language. The novel demystifies the language’s institutionalized system of signification and defies identifiable decipherable meaning in many ways, such as covert and overt deterritorialization of language, escape from “territorial” and “representational” language, defiance of signification, neutralization of sense, asyntactical language, phantasmagorical and absurd tales, quizzical jokes, silly songs, and asubjective free indirect narration. Against the Day’s practice of language prefers the territory of asubjective insignification to subjective, symbolic, and signifying usage of language so as to dismantle the territory of representation; thus, it pushes the major language towards or even out of its limits

A new algebraic invariant for weak equivalence of sofic subshifts

It is studied how taking the inverse image by a sliding block code affects the syntactic semigroup of a sofic subshift. Two independent approaches are used: ζ-semigroups as recognition structures for sofic subshifts, and relatively free profinite semigroups. A new algebraic invariant is obtained for weak equivalence of sofic subshifts, by determining which classes of sofic subshifts naturally defined by pseudovarieties of finite semigroups are closed under weak equivalence. Among such classes are the classes of almost finite type subshifts and aperiodic subshifts. The algebraic invariant is compared with other robust conjugacy invariants.Research programme AutoMathA of ESF; Pessoa bilateral project Egide/Grices 11113YM "Automata, profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics"; FCT, grant SFRH/BD/24200/2005; POCI 2010; FS