My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to construct narratives about the struggle to regain freedom in novels such as Gravity’s Rainbow, Invitation to a Beheading, and VALIS. On a disciplinary level, heretical reading is an interpretative method I exert to foreground possibilities of freedom within postmodern fiction that intrude into the background of the poststructuralist definition of the world but ultimately transcend it.