Journal ArticleDOI
September 11 and the Question of Innocence in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Bleeding Edge
TLDR
Pynchon's politics have frequently been minimized in the criticism of his work, in large part because his novels' profusion of voices makes a stable position difficult to pin down.Abstract:
Thomas Pynchon’s politics have frequently been minimized in the criticism of his work, in large part because his novels’ profusion of voices makes a stable position difficult to pin down. I argue that Against the Day’s (2007) various reflections on what it means to be “innocent”—politically, artistically, ethically—are central to an understanding of how Pynchon historicizes September 11 and terrorist violence. Shifting from the historical, allegorical mode of Against the Day to a relatively realistic representation of 9/11 and its aftermath in Bleeding Edge (2013), Pynchon searches for points of resistance in the flattened network of twenty-first-century global capital. In his rejection of both the techno-utopian faith in the Internet as an instrument of liberation and the possibilities of withdrawal in an age of pervasive surveillance, Pynchon instead turns to the next generation, finding perhaps the only hope for the future of progressive politics in the children themselves.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden:
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on small-scale conflicts, not necessarily between rebels and the state, but for those more sympathetic to the Boserupian approach than the neo-Malthusian, providing interesting and convincing examples of Africans' ability to deal with resource challenges in a flexible and creative way.
Journal ArticleDOI
The changing face of post-postmodern fiction: Irony, sincerity, and populism
TL;DR: The authors investigates the continuing resonance and inadvertent implications of David Foster Wallace's hope of a re-emergence of sincerity in contemporary society, tracing the evolution of so-called post-postmodernist fiction.
Journal ArticleDOI
Interrogating New York City: The Detective as Flâneur in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge
TL;DR: In Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, New York City is represented, as the epigraph suggests, as an enigmatic suspect in a mystery novel who hides "the real story" in many different ways as mentioned in this paper.
References
More filters
Book
The rise of the network society
TL;DR: The Rise of the Network Society as discussed by the authors is an account of the economic and social dynamics of the new age of information, which is based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, it aims to formulate a systematic theory of the information society which takes account of fundamental effects of information technology on the contemporary world.
Book
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that it is acceptable, even necessary, to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all, and argue against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.
Book
Welcome to the Desert of the Real
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identified the key feature of the XXth century the "passion of the Real /la passion du reel /la Passion du reel/"1: in contrast to the XIXth century of the utopian or "scientific" projects and ideals, plans about the future, which aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longerfor New Order The ultimate and defining experience of the 21st century was the direct experience of real as opposed to the everyday social reality the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the
Book
A map of misreading
TL;DR: The second volume in Harold Bloom's series of works which reveal his theory of revisionism, demonstrating his theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defence against the influence of precursor poems.