Journal ArticleDOI
After the counterculture: American capitalism, power, and opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
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TLDR
Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture are analyzed in this article, where the authors take Mason & Dixon (1997) as an example of Pynchone's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes.Abstract:
Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.read more
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Critical Literature Review
TL;DR: In this article, a review of the literature is used as a way to frame and focus a research project, which can help to enhance conceptual sensitivity and make claims about the possible significance of a work.
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Journal ArticleDOI
“Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive”: Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity’s Rainbow
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History, Utopia and Transcendence in the Space-Time of Against the Day
TL;DR: Pynchon has been the most consistently cosmopolitan writer of all American contemporary writers as mentioned in this paper, whose narrative range extends from the American continent to contexts, episodes and conflicts throughout the history of Western civilization, its beliefs, its scientific thought and its colonial conquests.
Journal ArticleDOI
Pynchon, Genealogy, History: Against the Day
TL;DR: Pynchon is a writer of modernization, of its historical preconditions, aims, and limits as mentioned in this paper, a writer who has been living in the era of modernization since the 17th century.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Business of Living: Gravity's Rainbow , Evolution, and the Advancement of Capitalism
TL;DR: For instance, the authors observed a marked decrease in enthusiasm for Pynchon's works among students of American literature over the last few years, and one broad shift in cultural attitudes is particularly noteworthy.