A trip to the National Railway Museum in York always produces a frisson but last month was special. Coinciding with the jubilee celebrations was Railfest 2012, billed as Britain’s biggest ever gathering of rail record breakers. Historic locomotives large and small awaited informed homage from the nation’s trainspotters.⇑

Yes, we were all wearing anoraks (in fairness, it was an outdoor exhibition) and yes, sales of dry white wine were outstripped by a beer called Flying Scotsman, but the crowds …

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/345/bmj.e4620.full.pdf

A golden age

In her discussion of Orwell’s 1984, Judith Shklar makes a compelling case for the use of literature in political theory contra the Platonic opposition to the poets. She concludes that political theory is not tied to an external reality, but rather is part of the ‘languages of the republic of letters’ and that it is by ‘attending carefully to all imaginative and scholarly literature’ that one can ‘establish the historical identity of ideas’ (Shklar, 1985, 17). The advantage of widening political theory’s compass to include literature is that this allows a greater capacity to play out the potentialities inherent in political theory, as literature, ‘illustrates, dramatizes, personalizes, and raises the questions that political theory asks and the ideas it suggests. It even helps us to tell our stories, and indeed may even help us to decide what story to tell and how to go about it’ (Shklar, 1985, 17). Richard Rorty goes further when he states: ‘Fiction … gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction … gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress’ (Rorty, 1989, xvi).

/pdf/escaping-the-politics-of-the-irredeemable-earth-anarchy-and-2n4fh37vce.pdf

Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth—Anarchy and Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

by Brett Paice Whereas the Gothic traditionally relied upon supernatural figures of evil (vampires, ghosts, monsters) to produce the sensation of fear or terror, contemporary manifestations of the Gothic repudiate such abstracted constructions, favoring, instead, metonymical and everyday representations of terror. In this project, I argue that the works of artists Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson signify, what I term, the postmodern American Gothic, through their production of a symbolic economy of fear, paranoia, and dread. I contend that these artists’ works represent narrative critiques of the United States’ culture of consumption and history of imperialism dating back to the myth of Manifest Destiny. Moreover, these artists’ historiographic narratives rigorously complicate traditional conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, nationhood, and colonialism as aspects of American history. Deconstructing the tropic elements of the gothic genre distinguishes these artists’ creation of a gothic aesthetic that privileges the lived horrors of historical record (slavery, the Holocaust, imperial modernity, oppression engendered through male-centered master

Postmodern American Gothic: The politics of fear in the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, and Steve Erickson

Flirters, Deserters, Wimps, and Pimps: Thomas Pynchon's Two Americas

Particularly drawing on the theory of Jacques Attali and Horkheimer and Adorno, this article considers popular music in Pynchon’s novels as more than simply a ‘soundtrack’ to the plot.  Much attention has been paid to Pynchon’s original songs, but not to the manner of their dissemination; therefore, this article examines the role of the popular musician in the production of consumer culture, focusing on McClintic Sphere ( V. ), The Paranoids ( Lot 49 ), and Billy Barf and the Vomitones ( Vineland ).  Pynchon depicts a modern ‘culture industry’ in which recording artists, voluntarily or not, ape their forbears, but in which the idea that live performance is liberating whereas recording is constraining, is problematized.  The article explores Sphere’s struggles to become successful in the face of live audiences that constantly compare him to Charlie Parker rather than assessing his music on its own merits, and the twin inspirational and coercive ‘moulding’ forces he experiences during the recording process that represents the only chance for musicians to disseminate their music widely and find a properly appreciative public.  Similarly, the disjunction between the Paranoids’ deviant lyrics and behaviour, and their thoroughly generic sub-Beatles musical texture, which adheres to the tropes of recorded music (one song ‘fades out’ even when played live!) is discussed; they too are caught in an excluded middle between transgression and conformity, as are the Vomitones, who in one live performance suppress their rebellious ‘punk’ aesthetic when they gain employment performing Italian ballads at a Mafia wedding.  Ultimately this article argues that popular music is equally moulded by live audiences and by recording bosses and that its absorption into networks of capital is inevitable, so musicians, given the chance, may as well ‘sell out’, and hope to balance commercial success with at least a modicum of creative control.

https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/432/galley/540/download/

“Sell Out With Me Tonight”: Popular Music, Commercialization and Commodification in Vineland, The Crying of Lot 49, and V.

The publication of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in 1990, 17 years after his epochal Gravity's Rainbow, received unprecedented attention from the media and tens of thousands of readers, all wondering why the novel was so long in the making and whether it would be as momentous as his last novel. The Vineland Papers is the first book-length study of Pynchon's problematic new novel: a dozen leading Pynchon critics offer their takes on the book examining it from a variety of angles: its relation to Pynchon's previous work, its humor, its use of various technical fields, its use of history and film, its politics, its structure, and its autobiographical elements. Feminist theory is brought to bear on Pynchon's representation of women in the novel by several of the contributors, and all of them write in an accessible manner so that the book will appeal to the general reader as well as the scholar. For many readers and scholars alike Pynchon is the single most important living novelist, and The Vineland Papers is invaluable for understanding how his fourth novel alters or confirms that reputation. The contributors include David Cowart, N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush, Elaine B. Safer, Joseph Slade, Joseph Tabbi, Susan Strehle, Stacey Olster, Molly Hite, William E. Grim, Eric Solomon, Andrew Gordon, and Clifford Mead.

The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel

A Pynchon for the Nineties@@@Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text@@@Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power@@@The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel@@@Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis@@@The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon@@@New Essays on "The Crying of Lot 49"

(1973). Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and the Fiction of Atrocity. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 38-51.

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and the Fiction of Atrocity

(1975). Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and the American Origins of Black Humor. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 41-54.

Donald J. Greiner

Papers

The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and the Fiction of Atrocity

Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and the American Origins of Black Humor

Updike and Salinger: A Literary Incident