Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice Fall/Winter 2015 (7:3/4) 36 Californian Paranoia in Germany: Teaching the Political Aesthetic of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 Ian Afflerbach, University of California, Davis ABSTRACT: While teaching as an exchange lecturer in Mainz, Germany, students misperceived me as a Californian, leading me to an unexpected responsibility for the state's history and culture. As one of my courses turned to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, students' questions about Californian politics motivated me to break with the traditional reading of Lot 49 as a postmodern novel, whose play with textual references precludes any interpretation distinguishing between "fiction" and "history." Instead, I developed an approach to teaching Lot 49 that situates the novel's interpretive difficulties within the historical and political terrain of its contemporary California. At first encouraging students to participate in the paranoid tendencies of Lot 49, floating freely between its many interconnected references and signs, we drew attention to the novel's aesthetic and the way it encourages this paranoia. Calling our own reading practice into question, we then explored the politics of paranoia, complicating the familiar narrative of California's New Left with the less commonly taught history of the New Right. By letting students piece together this political backdrop in the novel, they discover for themselves what their earlier paranoid reading had obscured. Concluding with a portable lesson on the politics of literature, I explain how this approach to The Crying of Lot 49 emphasizes an aesthetic politics: encouraging students to become conscious of the experience of reading a text—both what entices them and what remains at first unseen—and situating that process of reception within the social space of the novel. I recently returned from a yearlong position as guest lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University, in Mainz, Germany. Teaching in their American Studies Department, rather than in my home department of English at the University of California, Davis, I had the opportunity to reframe JGU's core courses on twentieth-century American culture through the study of literature. While I was well briefed on the departmental curriculum, and built my classes accordingly, I was surprised to discover that teaching American literature to students in Mainz involved a shift in my own identity as a teacher as well. For my students, who encountered me as a visitor from the University of California, I seemed an emissary from the Golden State, that shimmering fantasy built up for them by Hollywood, the music industry, and primetime television. In truth, I have been a resident of California for a mere five years, growing up largely in New England and moving west only for graduate school. Neither I, nor any lifelong NorCal resident for that matter, would identify my speech, dress, or demeanor as typically Californian. Nonetheless, from the beginning of my yearlong