Since 1959, Chicago's The Second City improvisational comedy troupe has played a critical role in developing some of the most successful comedians in the United States and Canada.Comedians such as Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, James Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, and Richard Kind, to name a few, have all performed with The Second City.Between 1991 and 1997, L.A. Theatre Works, in conjunction with Chicago Theatres on the Air, had the pleasure of producing a n...

Since 1959, Chicago's The Second City improvisational comedy troupe has played a critical role in developing some of the most successful comedians in the United States and Canada. Comedians such as Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, James Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, and Richard Kind, to name a few, have all performed with The Second City.Between 1991 and 1997, L.A. Theatre Works, in conjunction with Chicago Theatres on the Air, had the pleasure of producing a number o...

The 1963 publication of Thomas Pynchon’s V. changed the landscape of American fiction. Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. offers a detailed examination of the dramatic transformations that took place as Pynchon’s foundational novel went from typescript to published work. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft develop and deploy a rich theory of genetic narratology to examine the performance of genre in the novel. Pushing back against the current dominance of cognitive na...

Thomas Pynchon’s fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon’s representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether q...