Steven Belletto
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199826889
- eISBN:
- 9780199932382
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199826889.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
After a brief comparison of Ian Hacking’s intellectual history The Taming of Chance to William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions (1955), chapter two analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), ...
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After a brief comparison of Ian Hacking’s intellectual history The Taming of Chance to William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions (1955), chapter two analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), and argues that its sophisticated use of narrative chance creates an aesthetic response to totalitarian political fictions. One of the first big postmodern American novels, V. merits sustained analysis in the context of chance’s role in Cold War culture because it thematizes the function of narrative chance. Pynchon suggests a novelist’s own potential complicity in creating a fictional universe in which putative moments of chance are actually products of authorial design. V.’s innovative form is a way to work out the inclusion of chance in a novel and to level a critique of both totalitarian political systems and also Cold War norms back in the States, a comparison that became widespread in American fiction in the latter half of the 20th century. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), and Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991).Less
After a brief comparison of Ian Hacking’s intellectual history The Taming of Chance to William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions (1955), chapter two analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), and argues that its sophisticated use of narrative chance creates an aesthetic response to totalitarian political fictions. One of the first big postmodern American novels, V. merits sustained analysis in the context of chance’s role in Cold War culture because it thematizes the function of narrative chance. Pynchon suggests a novelist’s own potential complicity in creating a fictional universe in which putative moments of chance are actually products of authorial design. V.’s innovative form is a way to work out the inclusion of chance in a novel and to level a critique of both totalitarian political systems and also Cold War norms back in the States, a comparison that became widespread in American fiction in the latter half of the 20th century. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), and Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991).
Michael LeMahieu
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199890408
- eISBN:
- 9780199369652
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199890408.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The typescript drafts of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V. demonstrate the depth and extent to which Pynchon struggled to come to terms with the influence of logical positivism. Although Pynchon would ...
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The typescript drafts of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V. demonstrate the depth and extent to which Pynchon struggled to come to terms with the influence of logical positivism. Although Pynchon would strike most of the extended passages on positivism and the fact/value problem, traces remain in the published version. Pynchon explicitly refers to positivist doctrines such as the verificationist criterion of meaning and the emotive theory of ethics, particularly with reference to the word “love.” His reference to the first proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in the “Mondaugen’s Story” chapter testifies to his critique of literary modernism and logical positivism alike: their aspirations for totality are premised on a false and solipsistic concept of completeness, one that simply ignores that which falls outside of its purview, including questions of value and the voices of objectified colonial subjects. In response, Pynchon develops a negative aesthetic strategy that represents an ethical relation to others based on acknowledging their status not as sovereign subjects but as material beings, a relation characterized not by totalizing representation but by incomplete knowledge.Less
The typescript drafts of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V. demonstrate the depth and extent to which Pynchon struggled to come to terms with the influence of logical positivism. Although Pynchon would strike most of the extended passages on positivism and the fact/value problem, traces remain in the published version. Pynchon explicitly refers to positivist doctrines such as the verificationist criterion of meaning and the emotive theory of ethics, particularly with reference to the word “love.” His reference to the first proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in the “Mondaugen’s Story” chapter testifies to his critique of literary modernism and logical positivism alike: their aspirations for totality are premised on a false and solipsistic concept of completeness, one that simply ignores that which falls outside of its purview, including questions of value and the voices of objectified colonial subjects. In response, Pynchon develops a negative aesthetic strategy that represents an ethical relation to others based on acknowledging their status not as sovereign subjects but as material beings, a relation characterized not by totalizing representation but by incomplete knowledge.
Erik Dussere
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199969913
- eISBN:
- 9780199369027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199969913.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Thomas Pynchon’s trilogy of California novels, The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Vineland. Pynchon’s novels create a model in which there are “two Americas,” the ...
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This chapter examines Thomas Pynchon’s trilogy of California novels, The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Vineland. Pynchon’s novels create a model in which there are “two Americas,” the mainstream one represented by the American way of life, with its interlinking of political and commercial interests; and the true, alternative republic whose promise is perpetually betrayed. Pynchon, I suggest, uses the logic of American exceptionalism in order to argue that America perpetually fails to achieve the ideal state it imagines itself to be, producing a left-leaning narrative of national self-betrayal. In these novels, the promise of authenticity resides with the outcasts, the left-out and leftover, who have no place in a mainstream America that is wholly inhabited by consumer culture and so retreat to hidden enclaves where the promise of the republic may be revived or reinvented.Less
This chapter examines Thomas Pynchon’s trilogy of California novels, The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Vineland. Pynchon’s novels create a model in which there are “two Americas,” the mainstream one represented by the American way of life, with its interlinking of political and commercial interests; and the true, alternative republic whose promise is perpetually betrayed. Pynchon, I suggest, uses the logic of American exceptionalism in order to argue that America perpetually fails to achieve the ideal state it imagines itself to be, producing a left-leaning narrative of national self-betrayal. In these novels, the promise of authenticity resides with the outcasts, the left-out and leftover, who have no place in a mainstream America that is wholly inhabited by consumer culture and so retreat to hidden enclaves where the promise of the republic may be revived or reinvented.
David J. Alworth
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780691183343
- eISBN:
- 9781400873807
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691183343.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter aligns artist Robert Smithson with Thomas Pynchon, a novelist whose treatment of ruins mediates his preoccupation with time, as well as his celebrated critique of conventional ...
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This chapter aligns artist Robert Smithson with Thomas Pynchon, a novelist whose treatment of ruins mediates his preoccupation with time, as well as his celebrated critique of conventional historiography. Both were considered key figures in the emergence of postmodernism within their respective disciplines, and shared many preoccupations during the 1960s and 1970s, such as entropy and the paradox of representation without resemblance. Moreover, while Smithson is best known for his site-specific projects in visual and plastic media, he was also a prolific writer of narrative and essayistic prose. Pynchon is most readily appreciated for his experimentation with narrative form, he was equally interested in material sites, or what he calls “nonverbal reality”.Less
This chapter aligns artist Robert Smithson with Thomas Pynchon, a novelist whose treatment of ruins mediates his preoccupation with time, as well as his celebrated critique of conventional historiography. Both were considered key figures in the emergence of postmodernism within their respective disciplines, and shared many preoccupations during the 1960s and 1970s, such as entropy and the paradox of representation without resemblance. Moreover, while Smithson is best known for his site-specific projects in visual and plastic media, he was also a prolific writer of narrative and essayistic prose. Pynchon is most readily appreciated for his experimentation with narrative form, he was equally interested in material sites, or what he calls “nonverbal reality”.
Raymond Malewitz
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804791960
- eISBN:
- 9780804792998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791960.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter positions Thomas Pynchon's encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow alongside recent models of human-object interactions such as biomimetics, actor-network theory, and new vitalism. ...
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This chapter positions Thomas Pynchon's encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow alongside recent models of human-object interactions such as biomimetics, actor-network theory, and new vitalism. Pynchon's characters view the social histories of two important objects in the novel—the V-2 rocket and celluloid plastic—as either linear or circular. In the case of the former, objects are designed to maintain their structural integrity over time, which completely separates producers and consumers and, for Pynchon, catalyzes the environmental crisis of the late twentieth century. In the case of the latter, commodities, like natural materials, operate in a constant state of flux and thus have no singular use-value. This ecological model of an object's social life destabilizes the producer-consumer divide, reclaims the commodity as a site of creative re-production, and partially ameliorates the environmental crisis unleashed by industrial design procedures.Less
This chapter positions Thomas Pynchon's encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow alongside recent models of human-object interactions such as biomimetics, actor-network theory, and new vitalism. Pynchon's characters view the social histories of two important objects in the novel—the V-2 rocket and celluloid plastic—as either linear or circular. In the case of the former, objects are designed to maintain their structural integrity over time, which completely separates producers and consumers and, for Pynchon, catalyzes the environmental crisis of the late twentieth century. In the case of the latter, commodities, like natural materials, operate in a constant state of flux and thus have no singular use-value. This ecological model of an object's social life destabilizes the producer-consumer divide, reclaims the commodity as a site of creative re-production, and partially ameliorates the environmental crisis unleashed by industrial design procedures.
Christopher Breu
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816688913
- eISBN:
- 9781452949178
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816688913.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter presents a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s novel V.. It examines how it presents the history of late capitalism by tracing the emergence of biopolitical forms of control in the first-world ...
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This chapter presents a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s novel V.. It examines how it presents the history of late capitalism by tracing the emergence of biopolitical forms of control in the first-world metropole and the colonial periphery. The novel describes a series of encounters between people who construct themselves as subjects of history (colonizer) and people who are constructed as the objects of history(colonial people), and portrays the inability of the colonizer to have control over the colonial people. It demonstrates the resistance to biopolitics and the shift from a state-administered biopolitics and thanatopolitics to a more economic-based regime of biopolitical and thanatopolitical production.Less
This chapter presents a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s novel V.. It examines how it presents the history of late capitalism by tracing the emergence of biopolitical forms of control in the first-world metropole and the colonial periphery. The novel describes a series of encounters between people who construct themselves as subjects of history (colonizer) and people who are constructed as the objects of history(colonial people), and portrays the inability of the colonizer to have control over the colonial people. It demonstrates the resistance to biopolitics and the shift from a state-administered biopolitics and thanatopolitics to a more economic-based regime of biopolitical and thanatopolitical production.
Adam Lifshey
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232383
- eISBN:
- 9780823241187
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823232383.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
Mason is an astronomer, Dixon a surveyor, and their paired scientific skills allow them to score with mathematical precision an eerily straight border that begins south of Philadelphia and scrolls ...
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Mason is an astronomer, Dixon a surveyor, and their paired scientific skills allow them to score with mathematical precision an eerily straight border that begins south of Philadelphia and scrolls forth westward. Like all parallels, the Mason-Dixon Line is written in invisible ink, but that hardly undercuts its powers and presence. Thousands of trees disappear in its path, thousands of indigenous people, too. The mapping project, a triumph of the Age of Reason, is therefore imbued with an ongoing production of the spectral. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, though written five centuries after Columbus's diary, shares with that text a profound preoccupation with an America created by absent presences.Less
Mason is an astronomer, Dixon a surveyor, and their paired scientific skills allow them to score with mathematical precision an eerily straight border that begins south of Philadelphia and scrolls forth westward. Like all parallels, the Mason-Dixon Line is written in invisible ink, but that hardly undercuts its powers and presence. Thousands of trees disappear in its path, thousands of indigenous people, too. The mapping project, a triumph of the Age of Reason, is therefore imbued with an ongoing production of the spectral. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, though written five centuries after Columbus's diary, shares with that text a profound preoccupation with an America created by absent presences.
Jesse Schotter
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474424776
- eISBN:
- 9781474445009
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424776.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that ...
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The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.
Less
The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.
J. Hillis Miller
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263103
- eISBN:
- 9780823266579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263103.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
A careful analysis of an early story by Thomas Pynchon, “The Secret Integration,” shows that it exemplifies all the major features of post-modern narrative, as identified by Fredric Jameson and ...
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A careful analysis of an early story by Thomas Pynchon, “The Secret Integration,” shows that it exemplifies all the major features of post-modern narrative, as identified by Fredric Jameson and others. Post-modern narrative differs from the post-modern condition in having as its goal a revelation through fiction of what our condition these days is. The problem with this periodization, however, is that a short novel such as Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” one of his “Exemplary Tales” (1613), already contains, no doubt in a different way from Pynchon, every one of the features that are said uniquely to characterize post-modern fiction. A full analysis of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” suggests that period characterizations are always suspect. Cervantes’s greatness partly lies in the way he employed four hundred years ago all the narrative devices and themes that in different mixes would characterize fiction in the West down to the present day.Less
A careful analysis of an early story by Thomas Pynchon, “The Secret Integration,” shows that it exemplifies all the major features of post-modern narrative, as identified by Fredric Jameson and others. Post-modern narrative differs from the post-modern condition in having as its goal a revelation through fiction of what our condition these days is. The problem with this periodization, however, is that a short novel such as Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” one of his “Exemplary Tales” (1613), already contains, no doubt in a different way from Pynchon, every one of the features that are said uniquely to characterize post-modern fiction. A full analysis of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” suggests that period characterizations are always suspect. Cervantes’s greatness partly lies in the way he employed four hundred years ago all the narrative devices and themes that in different mixes would characterize fiction in the West down to the present day.
Michael Harris
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691175836
- eISBN:
- 9781400885527
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691175836.003.0007
- Subject:
- Mathematics, Logic / Computer Science / Mathematical Philosophy
This chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. The prominence of mathematics in this book is exceptional even for Pynchon. Two of the main characters are at least part-time mathematicians; ...
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This chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. The prominence of mathematics in this book is exceptional even for Pynchon. Two of the main characters are at least part-time mathematicians; Hilbert, Minkowski, and Gibbs make cameo appearances; and several chapters are set in the Göttingen mathematics department. Inger H. Dalsgaard suggested that “a novel like Against the Day may be read in non-linear fashion, in keeping with the operations of a time machine.” No critic, however—not even the “seventeen of the foremost heavyweights from over forty years of Pynchon criticism” who contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon—seems to have taken seriously the possibility, which is explored in this chapter, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic.Less
This chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. The prominence of mathematics in this book is exceptional even for Pynchon. Two of the main characters are at least part-time mathematicians; Hilbert, Minkowski, and Gibbs make cameo appearances; and several chapters are set in the Göttingen mathematics department. Inger H. Dalsgaard suggested that “a novel like Against the Day may be read in non-linear fashion, in keeping with the operations of a time machine.” No critic, however—not even the “seventeen of the foremost heavyweights from over forty years of Pynchon criticism” who contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon—seems to have taken seriously the possibility, which is explored in this chapter, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic.
George Cotkin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190218478
- eISBN:
- 9780190218508
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190218478.003.0023
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Cultural History
This chapter looks at novels marked by various types of excess. In Pynchon’s great work Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is assaulted with erudition, puns, and possibilities. At the same time, the ...
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This chapter looks at novels marked by various types of excess. In Pynchon’s great work Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is assaulted with erudition, puns, and possibilities. At the same time, the excess is directed toward logical ends, and it mimics, in a fashion, the insanity connected with the Second World War and the potential for nuclear annihilation. The book also, within the context of the mainstreaming of pornography and excess in films premiering during in 1972, deals with domination and submission in sexual relations. Such themes appear raw in Delany’s novel from this period, Hogg, which features the varieties of sexual practice—including the grossest. His major science fiction novel from this period, Dhalgren, is about identity, community, and destruction, as well as the potential for liberation, with a storyline that is meant to lead one down various blind alleys of comprehension, in the mode of postmodernism. They were exploring transgression with abandon, as were others in this period, such as film director John Waters.Less
This chapter looks at novels marked by various types of excess. In Pynchon’s great work Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is assaulted with erudition, puns, and possibilities. At the same time, the excess is directed toward logical ends, and it mimics, in a fashion, the insanity connected with the Second World War and the potential for nuclear annihilation. The book also, within the context of the mainstreaming of pornography and excess in films premiering during in 1972, deals with domination and submission in sexual relations. Such themes appear raw in Delany’s novel from this period, Hogg, which features the varieties of sexual practice—including the grossest. His major science fiction novel from this period, Dhalgren, is about identity, community, and destruction, as well as the potential for liberation, with a storyline that is meant to lead one down various blind alleys of comprehension, in the mode of postmodernism. They were exploring transgression with abandon, as were others in this period, such as film director John Waters.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's ...
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Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's realism is part of a moral vision that indicates ‘an abiding respect for life’. This chapter considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation, which can be traced from his early novel My Life as a Man (1974), through The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.Less
Philip Roth has been both lauded and criticised for what John McDaniel (in the first monograph on Roth, published in 1974) calls his ‘commitment to social realism’. According to McDaniel, Roth's realism is part of a moral vision that indicates ‘an abiding respect for life’. This chapter considers some of the ways in which Roth's generic experimentation, which can be traced from his early novel My Life as a Man (1974), through The Counterlife (1986), The Facts (1988), Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993), appropriates, complicates and finally parodies aspects of both realism and postmodernism, making connections between these texts and works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien and Bret Easton Ellis.
David Brauner
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074240
- eISBN:
- 9781781700938
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074240.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This is a study of the contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, it offers a view of Roth as an ...
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This is a study of the contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, it offers a view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways. At the heart of this book are a number of readings of Roth's works both in terms of their relationships with each other and with fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien, Bret Easton Ellis, Stanley Elkin, Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. The book identifies as a thread running through all of Roth's work the use of paradox, both as a rhetorical device and as an organising intellectual and ideological principle.Less
This is a study of the contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, it offers a view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways. At the heart of this book are a number of readings of Roth's works both in terms of their relationships with each other and with fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien, Bret Easton Ellis, Stanley Elkin, Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. The book identifies as a thread running through all of Roth's work the use of paradox, both as a rhetorical device and as an organising intellectual and ideological principle.
Steven Belletto
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199826889
- eISBN:
- 9780199932382
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199826889.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and ...
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This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others—contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: “It was no accident, Comrade,” which encapsulates a popular American understanding of Marxism). No Accident, Comrade explains how the association of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War culture, and then uses this opposition as a starting point for a discussion of the period’s literature. I show how writers innovated strategies for dealing with and incorporating chance, which allowed them to theorize the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict. Indeed, by emphasizing the Cold War’s narrative quality—that is, by viewing it as a rhetorical field—this book likewise argues that pressure was put on fictional narratives in general, and that if we attune ourselves to the uses of chance in such material, we can understand how the Cold War encouraged new relationships between aesthetics and politics.Less
This book argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers—politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others—contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. This contention often worked by claiming that the Soviet system perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction made visible by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the refrain from which the title is taken: “It was no accident, Comrade,” which encapsulates a popular American understanding of Marxism). No Accident, Comrade explains how the association of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War culture, and then uses this opposition as a starting point for a discussion of the period’s literature. I show how writers innovated strategies for dealing with and incorporating chance, which allowed them to theorize the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict. Indeed, by emphasizing the Cold War’s narrative quality—that is, by viewing it as a rhetorical field—this book likewise argues that pressure was put on fictional narratives in general, and that if we attune ourselves to the uses of chance in such material, we can understand how the Cold War encouraged new relationships between aesthetics and politics.
Nina Engelhardt
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474416238
- eISBN:
- 9781474449656
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416238.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on ...
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Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.Less
Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.
Paul K. Saint-Amour
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190200947
- eISBN:
- 9780190200978
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190200947.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
“Perpetual Interwar” reads Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as a novelistic antecedent to this book. Adapting the formal strategies of Ulysses and its genre-mates to the frames of colonial genocide, ...
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“Perpetual Interwar” reads Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as a novelistic antecedent to this book. Adapting the formal strategies of Ulysses and its genre-mates to the frames of colonial genocide, species extinction, area bombing, and nuclear war, Pynchon’s novel surfaces what is often latent in its precursors: the links between metropolitan and colonial violence, the relationship between total war and totalizing form, and the apprehension, well before 1945, of a traumatizing anticipation we still associate almost exclusively with the post-Hiroshima era. Gravity’s Rainbow’s fixation on the 1920s and ’30s reads the Cold War moment of its writing as a perennialized interwar period. The conclusion ends with a discussion of the interwar as the normative time of national sovereignty—as the temporality par excellence of a state defined by its claim to past and future monopolies on violence—and of how political collectivities might imagine an alternative to perpetual interwar.Less
“Perpetual Interwar” reads Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as a novelistic antecedent to this book. Adapting the formal strategies of Ulysses and its genre-mates to the frames of colonial genocide, species extinction, area bombing, and nuclear war, Pynchon’s novel surfaces what is often latent in its precursors: the links between metropolitan and colonial violence, the relationship between total war and totalizing form, and the apprehension, well before 1945, of a traumatizing anticipation we still associate almost exclusively with the post-Hiroshima era. Gravity’s Rainbow’s fixation on the 1920s and ’30s reads the Cold War moment of its writing as a perennialized interwar period. The conclusion ends with a discussion of the interwar as the normative time of national sovereignty—as the temporality par excellence of a state defined by its claim to past and future monopolies on violence—and of how political collectivities might imagine an alternative to perpetual interwar.
