2024-03-28T16:17:26Z
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/api/oai/
oai:orbit:id:15322
2024-02-10T00:30:00Z
Review of Tore Rye Andersen, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 228 pp.
Review of Tore Rye Andersen, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 228 pp.
Severs, Jeffrey
None
2024-02-10T00:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.15322
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.15322
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/15322/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:10021
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
America’s Deserter: Forms of Racialised Mistreatment and Escaping the Need to Escape in Percival Everett’s <i>American Desert</i>
America’s Deserter: Forms of Racialised Mistreatment and Escaping the Need to Escape in Percival Everett’s <i>American Desert</i>
Kowalik, George
In this article, I consider the protagonist of Percival Everett’s American Desert (2004) – Theodore “Ted” Street – and his treatment as a short-lived cultural phenomenon after inexplicably coming back from the dead. I read Ted’s experiences alongside Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten’s ideas on the impacts of racial inequality on Black experience and writing. I discuss Hartman’s work on the “afterlife of slavery” in “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” (2016), and Moten’s Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being (2017), where he discusses the “predication of blackness” as “immersion” in the aftereffects of the slave trade.American Desert’s episodic narrative problematises Ted’s efforts to escape mistreatment by persistently placing obstacles in front of them. Ted’s afterlife leads to different forms of mistreatment, including unwanted media attention, harassment towards him and his family, and being held captive in two different settings, which are all intensified because Everett invites us to read his character as AfricanAmerican. In line with Hartman and Moten’s work, as the novel progresses Ted realises that to end his cycle of futile escapes he must escape the need to escape, which is a necessary response to the racialised mistreatment he is subjected to.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.10021
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10021
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10021/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:10552
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
Archive, Intertextuality and Genre in Percival Everett’s <i>The Trees</i> (2021)
Archive, Intertextuality and Genre in Percival Everett’s <i>The Trees</i> (2021)
Keeble, Arin
Harrison, Sheri-Marie
This article reads Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021) as a novel of racial terror that is both about the reading and interpreting of an archive of this violence and, in some senses, formally archival, too. Drawing on Theodore Martin’s theory of the “drag of genre” and “drift of the contemporary,” we consider the ways Everett’s novel modulates through different generic modes while critiquing and disrupting the ideological currents that move within them and normalize violence via generic conventionality. In The Trees, an extensive set of allusions complement the inherent intertextuality of the crime and gothic genres to form an archive which is further constituted by a literal (fictional) archive at the heart of the novel. This archive, kept by an elderly root doctor, features “almost everything ever written about every lynching in these United States of America since 1913” (103). From this point we draw on Saidiya Hartman’s and Toni Morrison’s critiques of the archives of slavery and an American literary archive, respectively, locating Everett’s project as a timely intervention that rightly positions state and state-sponsored terrorism at the heart of America’s history.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.10552
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10552
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10552/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:10349
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
“I Heard You Went to Nam”: Home, Hospitality, and Legitimated Violence in Percival Everett’s <i>Walk Me to the Distance</i>
“I Heard You Went to Nam”: Home, Hospitality, and Legitimated Violence in Percival Everett’s <i>Walk Me to the Distance</i>
Mitchell, Keith Bernard
Historian Daniel S. Luck has noted in Selma to Saigon that “the civil rights movement and the debates over the Vietnam War were at the center of the turbulence of the 1960s” (1). While true, one also recognizes that the afterlives of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War are momentous historical events with which America continues to contend. Several African American writers of the post-civil rights/post-Vietnam era, including Percival Everett, have written works of fiction that continue to grapple with the afterlives of these cataclysmic historical events. Set in the American West, Everett’s 1985 novel Walk Me to the Distance finds its protagonist, David Larsen, a returning Vietnam veteran, at loose ends. David winds up stranded in a small, remote town, Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he eventually decides to stay. His decision to settle in the West is as much influenced by his romanticization of life on the American Frontier as it is with his disgust for a rapidly changing country where he feels he no longer belongs. In this essay, I argue that Walk Me to the Distance is not only an astute meditation on Frontier Mythology and Frontier justice associated with the early settlement of the American West but also that the novel reveals that these foundational myths and ideas continue to be paradigmatic features of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.10349
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10349
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10349/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:9845
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
Impossible Chess, Close Reading, and Inattention as Disability in Percival Everett’s <i>Telephone</i>
Impossible Chess, Close Reading, and Inattention as Disability in Percival Everett’s <i>Telephone</i>
Eve, Martin Paul
Percival Everett’s Telephone (2021) is a novel published, by deliberate design, in three very different versions. Ostensibly, the author has claimed in interview, this choice was to test the boundaries of authorial authority and to delegate interpretative control to the reader. In this article, I argue that such a stance is disingenuous. Telephone is, instead, a novel that continually withholds information from the reader and that ultimately frustrates close reading techniques. In doing so, the text casts the reader into the mental viewpoint of the terminally ill child in the novel, Sarah, who suffers from the progressive neurological condition Batten disease. The outcome is that Telephone should be read as a novel that pathologizes readerly inattention but that, as a result, passes innovative comment on disability narratives in fiction more broadly.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.9845
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.9845
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/9845/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:11250
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
Introduction: Playing Metafictional Games with Percival Everett
Introduction: Playing Metafictional Games with Percival Everett
Pöhlmann, Sascha
This introduction to the special issue on Percival Everett provides a general overview of his work for new readers and then discusses it in terms of metafiction and play, focusing especially on his 2022 novel Dr. No. The text concludes with brief summaries of the essays contained in the special issue.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.11250
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.11250
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/11250/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:10061
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
“[O]ne is lost to understand what this has to do with the [Black] experience”: Percival Everett, André Alexis, and Racialized Authorial Expectations
“[O]ne is lost to understand what this has to do with the [Black] experience”: Percival Everett, André Alexis, and Racialized Authorial Expectations
Maus, Derek C.
Percival Everett and André Alexis have each affirmed their desire to produce art free from any external obligations by producing fiction designed to provoke and then to destabilize conditioned responses in their readers. One of the many ways in which both of them accomplish this aim is to write about subjects and in modes that confound what Lavelle Porter identifies as a host of “sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable” presumptions surrounding what Black writers should and should not write about. Both Everett and Alexis have written decidedly contemporary fiction that repurposes characters and plots from ancient Greek literature in various ways, including textual parody, metamythic pastiche, and conspicuous inclusion of Classical characters and forms into otherwise contemporary narratives. By doing so, they engage with a mythic tradition that a grossly reductive view on race and authorship perceives as not-theirs and navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis of cultural appropriation on one side and race treachery on the other. They not only explore their own aesthetic/philosophical interests through their renovations of Greek mythology, but they also hold up a mirror to the ways that the presumptions their readers bring with them affect (and limit) their interpretations.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.10061
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10061
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10061/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:9990
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
Revising National Myths Through Queer Kinship in Percival Everett’s <i>Wounded</i>
Revising National Myths Through Queer Kinship in Percival Everett’s <i>Wounded</i>
Nolan-Brueck, Sarah
This article reads Percival Everett’s 2009 novel Wounded as a narrative of new regionalism that engages with coalitional politics and reimagines important figures in the Western genre, such as masculinity, the family, and the frontier. By engaging with the remediation of Matthew Shepard’s murder, Everett refutes the power of metronormative narratives and showcases the ways in which crossing social boundaries can create inclusive community in places considered hostile to queer individuals. While many binaries are displaced in the novel, ultimately those of backward/progressive and us/them are reasserted, which displays the frontier’s powerful conceptual hold on the Western genre. The novel, however, does imagine a new role regionalism can play in imagining an American identity—a role that eschews more traditional, individualistic depictions of cowboy masculinity and instead emphasizes collectivity and responsibility toward others that accepts difference in favor of a broader ethic of care.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.9990
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.9990
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/9990/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:10433
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
The Power of Patriarchy: Everett’s Work on the Dionysus Myth in <i>Frenzy</i>
The Power of Patriarchy: Everett’s Work on the Dionysus Myth in <i>Frenzy</i>
Buschendorf, Christa
This interpretation of Percival Everett's novel Frenzy focuses on the author's rewriting of the myth of Dionysus and other Greek myths referenced in the text, as it is through the revisions of classical versions of the myths that Everett expresses his social criticism. In order to understand the character of the main protagonist Dionysos, the article also discusses Everett's appropriation of The Bacchae by Euripides, in particular of the English translation by C.K. Williams as well as the author's drawing on the Nietzschean concepts of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Finally, the analysis of major literary devices (narrative structure, first-person narrator, leitmotif of seeing, elements of humor) reveals various strategies Everett uses to incline readers to grapple with the severe critique of patriarchy and capitalism he offers.
2023-11-09T22:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.10433
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10433
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10433/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:10213
2023-08-06T18:35:00Z
Prefigurative Poetics: Language Writing’s New Sentence and the Politics of the New Left
Prefigurative Poetics: Language Writing’s New Sentence and the Politics of the New Left
Aarhus, Mathies G.
This article argues that prefiguration is an essential concept for understanding the postwar avant-garde’s affiliation with social movements. Against the backdrop of important recent arguments that link Language writing to the failings and inner conflicts of the 1960s, this essay claims that Language writing was bred out of a complex dialogue with the New Left as both a result of a disillusionment with political speech and an attempt to carry on the New Left’s democratic experiments. I show how the technique invented by Ron Silliman and other American West Coast poets called The New Sentence not only was a way of posturing in the established language of the New Left, but actively sought to continue the political legacy of the 1960s in much more direct ways than previously acknowledged. Most importantly, the New Sentence inherited the notion of prefigurative politics and the hopes that such a politics, if transferred to poetic form, could enact change by constructing an alternative model of society. As a merger between New Left politics and institutional critique, the New Sentence—and other avant-garde strategies after ‘68—prefigures new ways of life through aesthetic form.
2023-08-06T18:35:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.10213
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10213
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/10213/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:9380
2023-08-06T18:35:00Z
Selling San Narciso: Pierce Inverarity as Insider-Innovator in <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>
Selling San Narciso: Pierce Inverarity as Insider-Innovator in <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>
Johnson, Fred
This paper puts social networking theory into conversation with ideas from Michel de Certeau and Michel Serres, in order to explore the agency of Pierce Inverarity, whose death sets in motion Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Pierce—a 1960s war profiteer, maker of soulless cityscapes, and master manipulator—is justifiably seen as a villain. But he is also the novel’s most effective agent; he manipulates the culture he discovers and cultivates instabilities from which he profits. Lot 49’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, habitually looks for central managers in control of the culture, but Pierce is not that. Instead, he is an often subtle persuader who designs ephemeral spaces that invite the agency of outsiders. He counts on the creative misuses people may find for his products. He does not have his community’s best interests at heart, but he demonstrates what it means to come alongside a community and foster gradual change. Pynchon—by making his villain an effective community change agent—sharpens his critique of middle-class complacency: Oedipa recoils from the decentralized cultural complexity that Pierce welcomes. Pynchon suggests that so long as Oedipa and her clever, educated cohort think of society as the product of other powerful ruling minds, agents like Pierce will have the advantage, as they diffuse their self-serving innovations through the networks of contemporary life, unchecked.
2023-08-06T18:35:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
11
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.9380
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.9380
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/9380/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:9637
2022-11-18T11:55:00Z
Review of: Pynchon’s Sound of Music
Review of: Pynchon’s Sound of Music
Ketzan, Erik
A book review of Christian Hänggi's Pynchon’s Sound of Music (Diaphanes, 2020)
2022-11-18T11:55:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.9637
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.9637
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/9637/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:9183
2022-08-30T15:30:00Z
Review: Vineland Reread
Review: Vineland Reread
O'Bryan, Michael
A book review of Peter Coviello's Vineland Reread (Columbia University Press, 2021)
2022-08-30T15:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.9183
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.9183
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/9183/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8828
2022-08-22T18:30:00Z
<i>Apes in the Plan</i>: An Unpublished Typescript by Jonathan Lethem
<i>Apes in the Plan</i>: An Unpublished Typescript by Jonathan Lethem
Brooker, Joseph
Apes in the Plan is a typescript by the US novelist Jonathan Lethem, stored at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. This typescript comprises a complete unpublished novel, written c.1983-1986. Part I of the present article describes this text, identifies key precursors, explains its likely aesthetic sources and clarifies its place in literary and cultural history. Part II then integrates this text into the longer narrative of Lethem’s oeuvre by highlighting and analysing specific continuities between this text and Lethem’s later, published work. The analysis thus contributes to the understanding of Lethem’s work as a whole, by emphasising the continuity of certain themes and motifs from an earlier stage than has previously been recognised. The analysis demonstrates that even as Lethem left behind Apes in the Plan as a piece of juvenilia, he also continued to work with prominent aspects of this text, including character names, science fictional features, social critique, an interest in animal life, and a heightened awareness of language. An advocate of cultural 'second use', Lethem would find a second use for some of the elements that he had first deployed in Apes in the Plan.
2022-08-22T18:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8828
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8828
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8828/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8454
2022-05-27T16:00:00Z
The Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early Burroughs
The Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early Burroughs
Hoffman, Todd
William Burroughs early book Junky is generally separated from his later experimental fiction. Stylistically it accords much more to realism than the postmodern aleatory method he later innovated. However, Burroughs’ preoccupation with resisting all forms of subjectification, his disenchantment with bourgeois life and his simultaneous literal and tropic use of addiction as a form of flight from powers of normalization and conformity are strongly present in this early work. This paper explores Junky on three fronts. First, it shows the novel as an elaboration of a posthumanist existentialism by emphasizing the materiality of the body through Burroughs’ explanation of the physiological mechanisms of addiction. Through this existentialist posthumanism, the novel critically responds to Sartrian existentialism, which was so fashionable at the time of Burroughs’ writing, and repudiates the Jeffersonian idealization of the transcendental subject and its middle class figurations. The emphasis on the material body simultaneously challenges post-structuralist renderings of Burroughsian readings. This leads to a conception of strategies of flight from all forms of conformity by utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs and immanent Life. Junk is a vehicle of flight and self-affirmation, a means of highly individualized, libertarian modes of subjective deterritorialization. Addiction and habitual use are not mere uncontrolled thirsts, but forms of actualizing a wholly detached social and independent individual. But the danger of junk lies in its reterritorializing of the body through new assemblages of need and dependence, leading the protagonist to ultimately seek a different mode of escape. Junk illuminates our posthuman existential condition and leads Burroughs to seek new experimental forms of aesthetic expression.
2022-05-27T16:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8454
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8454
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8454/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8226
2022-04-01T16:15:00Z
The Empowering Paradox of “1 = 2.” Mark Z. Danielewski’s Arithmopoetics
The Empowering Paradox of “1 = 2.” Mark Z. Danielewski’s Arithmopoetics
Sezer, Burak
This paper analyzes Danielewski's poetics of numbers and digits in the first season of The Familiar. I argue that Danielewski's recent work signals a balance shift from the topological to the arithmetical. In this regard, numbers fulfill a crucial role (1) in the serial makeup of the volumes, which could be labelled as his exorithmetic; (2) in the plot of the novel itself, his endorithmetic; and (3) as a recursive device that conjoins the materiality of the novel with the numbers in the plot, his mesorithmetic. While Danielewski's exorithmetic provokes hypotheses about the voluminousness of the project, the staggering numbers in the world of The Familiar are related to Xanther's epilepsy, Dov's teachings, and Anwar's trauma.
2022-04-01T16:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8226
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8226
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8226/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8322
2022-04-01T16:12:00Z
Forget-me-not: Giving Voice to Memory in Mark Z. Danielewski's "The Familiar" and Elsa Morante's "La Storia"
Forget-me-not: Giving Voice to Memory in Mark Z. Danielewski's "The Familiar" and Elsa Morante's "La Storia"
Flack, Corey
Among the many, intertwining motifs spanning the volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, the repeated reference to forget-me-nots is not one that leaps off the page to the reader. Its presence in Xanther’s seizure in Volume 4: Hades speaks to larger notions of memory of tragedies such as the Armenian Genocide, or even the chronomosaic timelines present in Danielewski’s earlier novel, Only Revolutions. This paper, while exploring notions notions of memory through Adriana Cavarero’s theory of the narratable self, will argue that their root is in Elsa Morante’s 1974 novel La Storia, which centers on a Jewish mother and her son, both epileptic, in Rome during World War II. Yet, while both works utilize their characters’ epilepsy as a way to better acknowledge the suffering and tragedies occurring around them, Morante’s articulation of the crushing wheel of history differs from the more hopeful presentation Danielewski provides. Through her epilepsy, Xanther instead emerges as a character who highlights the importance of giving voice to others, especially those unable to speak for themselves.
2022-04-01T16:12:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8322
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8322
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8322/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8335
2022-04-01T16:11:00Z
The Worst of Both Worlds: The Familiar's E-Books and Their Unhandy Limitations.
The Worst of Both Worlds: The Familiar's E-Books and Their Unhandy Limitations.
Ezerin, Ian
The commercial longevity and actual continuity of Mark Z. Danielewski’s series The Familiar was, by default, subject to the audience’s enthusiasm about it. But the latter hinges on a number of factors, which include not only the appeal of the plot and the author’s cult status, but also, importantly, the material conditions of the reading experience and the broader patterns of the economics of contemporary publishing industry. The argument of this essay considers the characteristics and effects of The Familiar’s somewhat inglorious digital incarnation, to infer that the absence of a ‘proper’ (i.e. medium-specific) and functional (i.e. responsive to highlighting, annotations, word selection and search, translation, and other functions afforded by digital devices) e-book edition significantly factored into the causes of the “pause” in the series’ progression, announced by the writer on February 2nd, 2018.
2022-04-01T16:11:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8335
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8335
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8335/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8645
2022-04-01T16:00:00Z
Introduction: Becoming Familiar with The Familiar, or, The Imaginary Novel and the Imagination
Introduction: Becoming Familiar with The Familiar, or, The Imaginary Novel and the Imagination
Pöhlmann, Sascha
This essay is the introduction to the special issue of Orbit: A Journal of American Literature on Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar. As a starting point for readers, it places the the five novels in the context of a longer literary history of multimodal writing. I argue that this alternative history undermines the realist monomodal paradigm that still persists in literature and literary criticism and challenges their normativity that has, for example, mainly excluded multimodal forms such as children's literature or comics. At the same time, I identify a corresponding narrative bias in considerations of multimodal literature, as I connect The Familiar to poetic models of meaning-making. I also argue that the imagination is a central concern of Danielewski's pentalogy, connecting plot elements such as VEM to readerly engagement and empathy. Finally, the introduction includes summaries of all the contributions to this special issue as well as a link to a bibliography of Danielewski criticism.
2022-04-01T16:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8645
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8645
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8645/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:8563
2022-04-01T15:40:00Z
‘Questionable + Intelligence’: Inter + Legere
‘Questionable + Intelligence’: Inter + Legere
Danielewski, Mark Z.
2022-04-01T15:40:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.8563
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8563
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/8563/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4799
2022-04-01T15:25:00Z
Reading Novels, Reading Networks: Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, Social Media, and the Digital Literary Sphere
Reading Novels, Reading Networks: Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, Social Media, and the Digital Literary Sphere
Panko, Julia
This article examines the theme of social networks in Mark Z. Danielewski’s serial novel The Familiar, as well as the social networks involved in the work’s reception, as a means of assessing the contemporary novel’s imbrication in social networks and social media. It contributes to critical discussions about The Familiar—and to broader conversations about the novel in the social media age—on two fronts. First, it analyzes Danielewski’s diegetic social networks. I argue that, in The Familiar, the planetary social is largely represented as a source of anxiety, as the existential threat of violence is amplified and perpetuated through social media. Yet the novel also explores how social networks offer the potential for resistance and protection from such violence. Second, the article describes how Danielewski’s real-world socially networked communities have impacted the interpretation of his writing. The analysis centers on the Facebook “Reading Club” dedicated to The Familiar and on the online discussion, conducted through WordPress, wherein students and faculty at multiple universities blogged about The Familiar, Volume 1. The WordPress discussion pushes the classroom into the blogosphere, troubling distinctions among academic interpretation, social networking, and public discourse. The Facebook group harnesses the conventions of both social media and book clubs, demonstrating how academic-adjacent interpretation may flourish in contexts not typified by such reading. At stake is a more nuanced understanding of the power and potential violence of communities constituted through social media; of the novel’s ability to represent and theorize such communities; and of the ways that reading communities’ emergence across social media has problematized longstanding conceptualizations of contemporary reading culture as characterized by a series of divisions (such as that between amateur and professional readers).
2022-04-01T15:25:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4799
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4799
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4799/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4803
2022-04-01T15:20:00Z
.Compostmodernism: Textual Machinery Through Typography and Materiality in Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar
.Compostmodernism: Textual Machinery Through Typography and Materiality in Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar
McDougall, Aislinn
This article defines “.compostmodernism” as a successor to postmodernism by explicating of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar as an example of .compostmodern textual machinery—a system of two interconnected “machines” (one abstract, the other physical) that are co-dependent and mobilized by the novel’s typography and materiality. Beginning by illustrating how The Familiar exemplifies .compostmodern textual machinery through its experimental typography which becomes the visual manifestation of literary cyber-consciousness, this article indicates how, in visually manifesting character cyber-consciousness, the novel’s typography actualizes the digitality of character interiority, ultimately drawing attention to the work’s status not only as literary artifice, but also as textual machinery. The demands of such experimental typography instantiate a physical relationship between reader and codex that emphasizes the novel’s materiality and requires the reader to engage with the text both physically and digitally. Ultimately, this digital engagement incorporates the internet not only as a crucial supplement for the reader to seek reference, translation apps, and supplementary (albeit obscure) Danielewski publications, but also as a medium for the reader to supplement the novel via social media output and online reading communities.
2022-04-01T15:20:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4803
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4803
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4803/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:6157
2022-04-01T15:15:00Z
Danielewski's The Familiar and the Concept of the Bibliotrope
Danielewski's The Familiar and the Concept of the Bibliotrope
Davis, Brian
Introducing the concept of the bibliotrope, this article offers a multimodal retooling of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope that seeks to incorporate the entire expressive apparatus of the multimodal novel into its framework. Whereas the conventional notion of the chronotope is defined by the ways temporal and spatial indices come together as an expressive unity to demarcate the physical parameters and generic functions and other recurrent elements in works of fiction, the bibliotrope incorporates the ways in which combinations of recurrent and highly stylized visual and textual configurations represent physical and social environments as well as the thoughts and actions of characters. The concept is applied to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, which I take to be an exemplary bibliotropic text. I frame my analysis of bibliotropes in Danielewski’s pentalogy within the broader context of Danielewski’s signature multimodal poetics, highlighting some of its most salient features, and provide a case study of the character Isandòrno’s bibliotrope. I conclude by outlining some potential research questions for further analysis of bibliotropes in The Familiar and beyond.
2022-04-01T15:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.6157
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.6157
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/6157/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4752
2022-04-01T15:10:00Z
Becoming-Signiconic: Emergence and Territory in The Familiar
Becoming-Signiconic: Emergence and Territory in The Familiar
Bekavac, Luka
The Familiar is densely structured by divisions and hierarchies in terms of plot, focalization, vocabularies and layout, but it is primarily a book of interconnectedness. This is a principle that propels its narrative and poses the biggest challenge in its execution: is it possible to describe a genuinely new and disruptive entity, a “monster” unreadable in terms of existing codes and concepts, arriving as a series of glitches, a system breach, a breakdown of defenses, an enforced encounter with the Other?The Familiar itself could be conceived as an arena where a new genus comes into being through the corporeality of text, not represented as a character or recounted as an event, but assuming flesh on the page within the suspended temporality of print. A specific signiconic lexicon was devised to blur the borders between the textual and the pictorial, to give a voice to the voiceless (“the waves, the animals, the plants”), and to “surpass or bypass the mind” (Danielewski). Placing this enlarged semiotic spectrum of the sensible and the intelligible within the traditional frame of a multi-volume novel makes its ambition even more radical. Pushing the book-as-archive beyond its historical confines of mimesis and expression, The Familiar envisions literature as a process, a distribution of forces across an ontologically heterogeneous field, suggesting a nonlinear continuum motivated by a “non-subject-centered mode of agency” (Bennett).Starting with notions of the book to come as a locus of futurity and unexplored possibility (Blanchot, Derrida) and assemblage as a multiplicity, a corpus of becoming or a zone of emergence (Deleuze and Guattari), this article attempts to examine the tension between storytelling demands and the very materiality of The Familiar (including its asemic borders or cores) in view of its own signiconic and inherently post-anthropocentric goals.
2022-04-01T15:10:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
2
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4752
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4752
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4752/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4810
2022-01-12T12:00:00Z
Review of Albert Rolls, Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text (Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019). 156 pp.
Review of Albert Rolls, Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text (Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019). 156 pp.
Benea, Diana
2022-01-12T12:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
10
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4810
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4810
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4810/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:3445
2021-11-23T10:45:00Z
Headley’s <i>The Mere Wife</i>: Diffused Satire in a troubling piece of Beowulfiana
Headley’s <i>The Mere Wife</i>: Diffused Satire in a troubling piece of Beowulfiana
Hume, Kathryn
Focus on Grendel's Mother leads us to expect a feminist attack on male heroic narrative, but Maria Dahvana Headley offers us a complex and nuanced look at parent-child, upper-lower class, and male-female patterns of interaction in this novel symbiotic upon the Anglo-Saxon BEOWULF. Since the attacks sometimes seem contradictory, I use diffused satire theory to separate the various kinds of satire, show where contradictions and ambiguities occur, and show how they can be resolved. Headley makes the point that you need to hear from all the voices in an event, not just from the last one who writes the history. What she does is give us those various voices and goad us to work out our personal positions on the issues for which she offers no easy satiric answer.
2021-11-23T10:45:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
9
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.3445
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3445
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/3445/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4378
2021-07-05T11:15:00Z
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Elmore Bros. on McCarthy-as-Philosopher; Isekenmeier on Contemporary Literary Mediality; Lindquist on Postnationalism in Postmodernism
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Elmore Bros. on McCarthy-as-Philosopher; Isekenmeier on Contemporary Literary Mediality; Lindquist on Postnationalism in Postmodernism
Elmore, Rick
Elmore, Jonathan
Isekenmeier, Guido
Lindquist, Andrew
Three Review Essays: Cormac McCarthy, Philosopher Review of:Eagle (ed), Philosophical Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Beyond Reckoning. Mundik, A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy.Hawkins, Cormac McCarthy’s Philosophy. Three Ways of Looking at a Horse: Literature and Media / The Medium of Literature Review of:St Clair, Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel ListeningBarton, Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction: Gaps, Gestures, ImagesBruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter “Where in the World is American Literature?” Tracing the Postnational in Postmodern and Contemporary FictionReview of:Coffman, Rewriting Early America: the Prenational Past in Postmodern LiteratureGarcía-Caro, After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon McClintock, Topologies of Fear in Contemporary Fiction: The Anxieties of Post-Nationalism and Counter Terrorism [a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature—especially in the present format of single review essays covering multiple related books—please send an email proposing a review to reviews@pynchon.net]
2021-07-05T11:15:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
9
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4378
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4378
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4378/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4759
2021-06-10T19:00:00Z
Gilles Chamerois: Obituary
Gilles Chamerois: Obituary
Chorier-Fryd, Bénédicte
The life and works of Gilles Chamerois (1966-2021).
2021-06-10T19:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
9
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4759
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4759
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4759/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:4370
2021-04-23T17:30:00Z
Book Reviews: Spring 2021
Book Reviews: Spring 2021
Personn, Tim
Santin, Bryan
Macura, Sergej
Wallach, Rick
Jansen, Brian
Dehdarirad, Ali
Rohland, Mark
Kahler, Jason
Book Reviews, of: Baskin – Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster WallaceÖzcan – Understanding William T. VollmannEve – Thomas Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault, AdornoCrews – Books are Made of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary InfluencesEmre – Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America Stephan – Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First CenturyCrosthwaite – The Market Logics of Contemporary FictionSilbergleid and Quynn (eds) – Reading & Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations [a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature, please send an email proposing a review to reviews@pynchon.net]
2021-04-23T17:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
9
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.4370
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.4370
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4370/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:3404
2021-01-15T11:00:00Z
Book Reviews, Special Pynchon-Scholarship-in-Languages-Other-than-English Edition, 2020
Book Reviews, Special Pynchon-Scholarship-in-Languages-Other-than-English Edition, 2020
Chetwynd, Ali
Bugno-Narecka, Dominika
Kipouridou, Romina
Abe, Kodai
Vanicek, Vit
Brondino, Andrea
Ryckx, Michel
Book Reviews, of:Pióro & Paryż (eds) – Thomas Pynchon [Polish]Aliaga (ed) – Thomas Pynchon [Spanish]Nagano –トマス・ピンチョン──帝国、戦争、システム、そして選びに与れぬ者の生 [Japanese – Thomas Pynchon: Empire, War, System, and the Lives of Preterites]Oleha – Perspektivy Konce: Thomas Pynchon a Americky Román po 11. Zari [Czech – Perspectives of the End: Thomas Pynchon and the American Novel after 9/11]Episcopo – L’Eredità Della Fine: Gravity’s Rainbow di Thomas Pynchon e Horcynus Orca di Stefano D’Arrigo [Italian – The Inheritance of the End: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Horcynus Orca by Stefano D’Arrigo]Plus:An interview on non-English-language Pynchon scholarship with vheissu.net bibliographer Michel Ryckx[a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature, please send an email proposing a review to reviews@pynchon.net]
2021-01-15T11:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
9
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.3404
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3404
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/3404/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:3378
2020-10-19T13:00:00Z
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Kavadlo on Palahniuk Criticism’s Defensiveness; Muždeka on UnPlaisirable Postmodern Translation; Chetwynd on Unnatural Narratology’s Postmodern Potential
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Kavadlo on Palahniuk Criticism’s Defensiveness; Muždeka on UnPlaisirable Postmodern Translation; Chetwynd on Unnatural Narratology’s Postmodern Potential
Chetwynd, Ali
Kavadlo, Jesse
Muždeka, Nina
Three Review Essays: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Palahniuk? Transgressive Fiction Meets Defensive Criticism Review of:Francisco Collado-Rodriguez (ed), Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke Douglas Keesey, Understanding Chuck PalahniukDavid McCracken, Chuck Palahniuk, Parodist: Postmodern Irony in Six Transgressive Novels Against the Plaisir-ization of Translation Review of:Barciński, A Study of Postmodern Literature in Translation as Illustrated through the Selected Works of Thomas PynchonWalkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World LiteratureTrubikhina, The Translator’s Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of Translation What Can the First Generation of Unnatural Narratology Offer the Study of “Postmodern” Fiction?Review of:Richardson, Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and PracticeAlber, Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and DramaShang, Unnatural Narrative Across Borders: Transnational and Comparative PerspectivesAlber, Skov Nielsen, and Richardson (eds), A Poetics of Unnatural NarrativeAlber and Richardson (eds), Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges [a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature—especially in the present format of single review essays covering multiple related books—please send an email proposing a review to reviews@pynchon.net]
2020-10-19T13:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
8
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.3378
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3378
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/3378/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:2926
2020-07-29T16:00:00Z
Book Reviews: Spring 2020
Book Reviews: Spring 2020
Dehdarirad, Ali
Meresse, Bastien
Jansen, Brian
Santin, Bryan
Coffman, Christopher K.
Jackson, Edward William
Gonzalez, Jeffrey
Najarian, Jonathan
Hume, Kathryn
Book Reviews, of:Dalsgaard (ed) – Thomas Pynchon in ContextChetwynd, Freer, Maragos (eds) – Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and GenderMogultay – The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the DayAlworth – Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social FormMullins – Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the SocialHenry – New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature: From Cage to Connectionden Dulk – Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers, and Foer: A Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary American LiteratureAnderson – Postmodern Artistry in Medievalist Fiction: An International StudyHouser – Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and AffectPalleau-Papin (ed) – Under Fire; William T. Vollmann, The Rifles: A Critical Study [a note from the Book Reviews Editor: if you’re interested in reviewing a book on any aspect of unconventional post-1945 US literature, please send an email proposing a review to reviews@pynchon.net]
2020-07-29T16:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
8
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.2926
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.2926
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/2926/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:488
2020-05-01T11:55:00Z
William Gaddis' 'Ford Foundation Fiasco' and <i>J R</i>'s Elision of the Teacher's-Eye View
William Gaddis' 'Ford Foundation Fiasco' and <i>J R</i>'s Elision of the Teacher's-Eye View
Chetwynd, Ali
I analyze William Gaddis’ transmutation, in J R (1975), of material from his abandoned book on instructional TV for the Ford Foundation (1962-3). Finding previously unknown sources for numerous passages of the novel, I focus on a pattern of changed emphasis. Gaddis’ work for Ford is scrupulous about the pedagogical potential of TV, which it sees as a viable classroom tool threatened by administrative misuse. The novel, however, turns material that initially focused on teachers’ experiences and dilemmas into indictments of administrative culture alone. I show how central the Ford project’s conception of administrative problems becomes to J R, trace the way that material originally organized around pedagogical concerns is repurposed to evoke administrative overreach and dysfunction, and demonstrate this transmutation-pattern’s implications for understanding the novel’s narrative and rhetorical drama.
2020-05-01T11:55:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
8
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.gaddis.3
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.3
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/488/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:1996
2020-05-01T11:50:00Z
Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of <i>J R</i>
Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of <i>J R</i>
Chetwynd, Ali
William Gaddis’ corporate writing in the years between his first two novels was as important to J R’s (1975) formal innovations as to its business-world plot. While previous J R criticism has dealt in formal tropes of flatness, depth, and flow, the corporate writing preserved in Gaddis’ archive offers grounds for reading the novel’s plot andstyle through the related but under-examined concept of friction. Through various archival discoveries, I sketch the case for a friction-centric reading of J R. I show what Gaddis’ work in the slide-show medium and assembling speeches out of contradictory source material contributed to the novel’s sentence-level innovations in style, and finally offer a style-driven re-reading of the novel’s overall narrative design. While Gaddis’ corporate work taught him techniques for eliminating traces of ideological friction, J R’s formal innovations first draw on those techniques to establish a world that tends toward frictionlessness, then invert them to restore friction within that world’s terms.
2020-05-01T11:50:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
8
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.gaddis.2
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.2
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/1996/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:1995
2020-05-01T11:30:00Z
William Gaddis’ Education-Writing and His Fiction: A Fuller Archival History
William Gaddis’ Education-Writing and His Fiction: A Fuller Archival History
Chetwynd, Ali
The little use that critics of William Gaddis’ fiction have previously made of his corporate writing career has concerned a very limited portion of its history: the fact that his cancelled book on classroom TV for the Ford Foundation contributed material to J R’s school-centric plot. Gaddis’ own dismissive retrospective account of the interest and significance of his corporate work has constrained critical investigation. The archive, though, reveals a close, sustained relationship between his corporate work and fiction. This article sets out their linked histories and surveys the archival material that future discussions of the relation between Gaddis’ corporate and artistic careers will need to take account of.
2020-05-01T11:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
8
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.gaddis.1
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.gaddis.1
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/1995/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:1994
2020-04-24T04:00:00Z
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Keane on Morrison and Love; Miller on Bradbury and his Times; Muth on Redescribing Feminist Aesthetics
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Keane on Morrison and Love; Miller on Bradbury and his Times; Muth on Redescribing Feminist Aesthetics
Keane, Alice
Miller, John
Muth, Katie
2020-04-24T04:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
8
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.1994
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1994
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/1994/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:1810
2019-11-25T19:00:00Z
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
McClintock, Scott
Whitmarsh, Patrick
Pitozzi, Andrea
Alberts, Crystal
Macura, Sergej
Thornton, Z. Bart
Rohland, Mark
Maragos, Georgios
2019-11-25T19:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.1810
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1810
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/1810/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:1349
2019-09-04T15:00:00Z
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Maus on Contemporary Literary Dissenters, Coffman on Religion and Postmodernism, Di Leo on Big Little Magazines
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Maus on Contemporary Literary Dissenters, Coffman on Religion and Postmodernism, Di Leo on Big Little Magazines
Coffman, Christopher K.
Maus, Derek
Di Leo, Jeffrey
Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Maus on Contemporary Literary Dissenters; Coffman on Religion and Postmodernism; Di Leo on Big Little Magazines
2019-09-04T15:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.1349
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1349
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/1349/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:813
2019-09-03T13:00:00Z
Desperately Seeking David: Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace
Desperately Seeking David: Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace
Miley, Mike
The power of David Foster Wallace’s narrative persona has only increased since his death in 2008; however, his early fiction presents alternate perspectives on authorial presence beyond the commonly accepted discourse on Wallace. A closer look at the authorial poses in The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair challenges the tidiness of a narrative that privileges sincerity at the expense of a discussion of such a notion’s assumptions and blind spots. In contrast to this narrative, Wallace pursues modes of authorship based in concealment throughout Broom and Girl, hiding his presence via a variety of boundaries, masks, queer personas, crosswriting, and imitative voices, to wildly varying degrees of success. In place of an intimate sense of presence, readers of these works receive a very different conception of authorship that crafts a series of imperial personas that adopt totalizing and phallocentric authorial positions that linger throughout Wallace’s body of work. However, several stories in Girl not commonly discussed in Wallace scholarship experiment with another, more present and intimate mode of authorship that rejects gimmicky authorial masks and dead authors and instead develops an author figure whose persona is convex, reaching outward toward the reader in hope of colliding with them rather than absorbing them.
2019-09-03T13:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.813
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.813
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/813/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:1387
2019-08-20T13:00:00Z
Postmodern Sublime in Context
Postmodern Sublime in Context
Tabbi, Joseph
Joseph Tabbi, who has a chapter of his own in the volume, Pynchon in Context (Cambridge 2018), corrects two citational errors in this same volume. Both mischaracterize, by reading out of context a sentence in Tabbi's 1995 monograph, Postmodern Sublime (Cornell University Press). Because Tabbi's arguments are thought (wrongly) to support an "old argument" in Pynchon criticism, Tabbi brings this misreading to the attention of contemporary literature scholars, before the wrong impression becomes general knowledge.
2019-08-20T13:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.1387
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1387
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/1387/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:768
2019-07-30T12:00:00Z
Nose-gaping: The Smells of <i>Mason & Dixon</i>
Nose-gaping: The Smells of <i>Mason & Dixon</i>
Phillips, Mike
This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells.
2019-07-30T12:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.768
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.768
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/768/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:788
2019-06-11T15:05:00Z
Blood on the Tracks: Pynchon, <i>Bleeding Edge</i>, and (Un)popular Music from Britney to Black Metal
Blood on the Tracks: Pynchon, <i>Bleeding Edge</i>, and (Un)popular Music from Britney to Black Metal
Thomas, Samuel
This article explores Pynchon’s allusions to popular (and unpopular) music in Bleeding Edge (2013). I argue that Pynchon’s engagement with music can not only be understood in terms of its periodizing function but also as an intricate practice of historical and prophetic/proleptic layering. This practice compellingly highlights some of the ways in which music is both uniquely subversive and uniquely vulnerable to co-optation. In doing so, Pynchon’s fiction resonates with much-debated critiques of popular music by theorists such as Attali and Adorno, while at the same time significantly departing from them. The analysis ranges across the novel’s sonic extremes, from the inescapable mega-hits of Britney Spears to the infamous Norwegian black metal scene. It uses a strategically-chosen selection of tracks as ports of entry into the “musical unconscious” (Julius Greve and Sascha Pöhlmann's term). Combining immersive close work on Bleeding Edge with extended discussions of the musical worlds beyond the novel's immediate parameters, the article ultimately moves towards a more expansive thesis: Music, I contend, can tell us as much about Pynchon as Pynchon does about music.
2019-06-11T15:05:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.788
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.788
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/788/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:782
2019-01-21T10:00:00Z
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Sanders, Michael J
Singer, Jacob
Maragos, Georgios
Becker, Jade Matthia
Kaltsas, Kostas
Kipouridou, Romina
Brick, Martin
Grgas, Stipe
Rolls, Albert
2019-01-21T10:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.782
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.782
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/782/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:589
2019-01-11T03:00:00Z
The Kairotic View of History in Thomas Pynchon's Novels
The Kairotic View of History in Thomas Pynchon's Novels
Thompson, Gary
The Kairotic View of History in Thomas Pynchon's NovelsThe rhetorical concept of kairos (right timing, right proportion, time viewed qualitatively) can expand the understanding of the "points" or decisive moments in Pynchon's historical novels. In addition to timeliness, kairos for theologians represents the intersection of the sacred with the profane. Kairos also provides insight into the novels' affect, lending rhetorical force to the concept from Marx that "the point is to change [history]." Following the hiatus preceding Vineland, Pynchon's global view of history becomes more restricted, with emphasis instead on smaller social enclaves and human connections.
2019-01-11T03:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
7
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.589
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.589
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/589/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:495
2018-10-01T11:00:00Z
Getting the Story: Joan Didion's Aesthetic Transformation
Getting the Story: Joan Didion's Aesthetic Transformation
Diamond, Sam
Many contemporary readings of Joan Didion, not to mention her public profile, present her early journalism as her crowning achievement. Works such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are venerated as definitive Didion texts. However, Didion's work, in particular her journalism and memoir, underwent a radical change following these texts. This change can be witnessed in the transformation of Didion's style and politics between Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her later work, which often appeared in the New York Review of Books under the editorial guidance of the late Robert B. Silvers. This article tracks this change, identifying Didion's move away from surety and an objective voice towards ambivalence, subjectivity and nuance in search of a specific ideal of truth. I argue that the development of Didion's style, both aesthetic and poetic, reflects a political evolution and a reconstitution of what it might mean to approach truth on a personal and journalistic level, and this has a particular resonance given present conversations around truth in journalism and politics.
2018-10-01T11:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
6
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.495
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.495
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/495/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1-22
oai:orbit:id:499
2018-06-05T09:30:00Z
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Sandberg, Eric
Lackey, Ryan
Eve, Martin Paul
Hoffman, Todd
Rongrui, Li
Book reviews
2018-06-05T09:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
6
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.499
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.499
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/499/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:483
2018-05-23T10:00:00Z
Mr. Pynchon Goes to Iowa: The Search for Community in the Later Novels
Mr. Pynchon Goes to Iowa: The Search for Community in the Later Novels
Harris, Michael
In much of his work, Thomas Pynchon has avoided the Midwest as a setting, and criticized the region as a cultural wasteland. However, his aversion to the Midwest has given way to a tacit recognition of that region in his later novels. Since his novels are often structured as quests to new worlds, the Midwest might qualify as a new, unexplored world. This essay analyzes Pynchon's portrayal of the Midwest, and, more specifically, Iowa, my home state. I argue that, beyond a literal, geographical place, Iowa, and the Midwest, function as a metaphor for a now unavailable imagined community.
2018-05-23T10:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
6
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.483
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.483
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/483/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:487
2018-05-11T11:50:00Z
The Pynchon Playlist: A Catalog and Its Analysis
The Pynchon Playlist: A Catalog and Its Analysis
Hänggi, Christian
The Pynchon Playlist is a catalog of 927 identified historical musicians and works of music in Thomas Pynchon's work to date. It allows for a bird's-eye view on the relative importance of different genres and time periods throughout Pynchon's career and is able to answer some questions that were hitherto mainly addressed in an intuitive manner: Which novels have the highest density of musical references? What musicians, works of music, genres, genders, performative settings are referred to most often? Are different groups of novels to be made out? If one were to draw two lines of influence for Pynchon's choice of musical material, it would be the technological and commercial developments on the one hand (in other words, a line that has much to do with a historically plausible depiction of the musical landscape) and Pynchon's own predilections and musical interests (or those of his and subsequent generations), which seem to have become less "serious" and less experimental as his career progressed.
2018-05-11T11:50:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
6
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.487
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.487
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/487/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:484
2018-03-22T09:00:00Z
Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe: Changing Masculinities from <i>The Long Goodbye</i> to <i>Inherent Vice</i>
Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe: Changing Masculinities from <i>The Long Goodbye</i> to <i>Inherent Vice</i>
Carswell, Sean
Several reviewers and scholars of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice have noted the similarities between the novel and both Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and the Coen brothers' film The Big Lebowski. Many of the reviewers, in particular, unreflectively comment on Doc Sportello's masculinity, criticizing Doc for not performing the hegemonic masculinity typical of detective novels and films. What has been missing is a deeper examination of hegemonic masculinity in both the novel and its likely source materials. This essay employs Judith Butler's notions of gender performativity as well as Christian Moraru's examination of postmodern rewriting to explore the fluid constructions and performances of masculinity in The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and Inherent Vice. Ultimately, this essay argues that Pynchon's characterization of Doc Sportello projects possibilities into alternatives to hegemonic masculinity.
2018-03-22T09:00:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
6
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.484
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.484
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/484/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
oai:orbit:id:486
2018-02-28T13:30:00Z
The Momentum of Pynchon's Secret Formula: <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i>’s Second Equation between Archival Sources and Fiction
The Momentum of Pynchon's Secret Formula: <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i>’s Second Equation between Archival Sources and Fiction
Engelhardt, Nina
Engelhardt, Harald
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) sports three equations in mathematical notation, and the second of these has puzzled readers for 45 years: is Pynchon’s Second Equation real or made up? And what role does it have for interpretations of Gravity’s Rainbow? In this paper, we draw on scientific documents and material from the archive of the German Museum, Munich (Deutsches Museum München) to establish the plausibility of the equation and determine its source. Based on our findings, we examine further instances of Pynchon's working with previously unidentified scientific sources, and reconsider the role of the Second Equation in Gravity’s Rainbow in terms of its relations to power and control, the life path of the 'main' character Tyrone Slothrop, and the novel's perspective on the ethical potentials of mathematics and physics.
2018-02-28T13:30:00Z
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
6
1
Open Library of Humanities
Orbit: A Journal of American Literature
10.16995/orbit.486
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.486
https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/486/
2398-6786
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
1
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