Planetary Pynchon

Planetary Pynchon PDF Author: Tore Rye Andersen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009377590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
While Thomas Pynchon is usually described as an American author who primarily writes about American reality, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene argues that his major novels, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, can profitably be read as a global trilogy that presents a coherent historical account of how the emergence and spread of European modernity across the world have had devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. This book sets a new agenda in Pynchon studies, charting his early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including globalization's demand for constant growth. It combines close textual readings with broad perspectives on large thematic arcs and stylistic developments across Pynchon's entire career as well as an extensive dialogue with the rich reception of his work.

Planetary Pynchon

Planetary Pynchon PDF Author: Tore Rye Andersen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009377590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book Here

Book Description
While Thomas Pynchon is usually described as an American author who primarily writes about American reality, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene argues that his major novels, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, can profitably be read as a global trilogy that presents a coherent historical account of how the emergence and spread of European modernity across the world have had devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. This book sets a new agenda in Pynchon studies, charting his early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including globalization's demand for constant growth. It combines close textual readings with broad perspectives on large thematic arcs and stylistic developments across Pynchon's entire career as well as an extensive dialogue with the rich reception of his work.

“From Faraway California”

“From Faraway California” PDF Author: Ali Dehdarirad
Publisher: Sapienza Università Editrice
ISBN: 8893772876
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Offering a transdisciplinary journey across Thomas Pynchon’s California trilogy, “From Faraway California” addresses the representation of (city)space in the Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice through “geourban” lenses. Drawing on specific concepts in urban and regional studies, the book provides a thorough examination of Pynchon’s spatial imaginary, where the reader comes to understand how his fiction tackles the socio-political and cultural consequences of urban restructuring in the contemporary city and the lives of its citizens. Pynchon’s depiction of California is further analyzed from mythical and environmental standpoints to shed light on his planetary vision and (post)postmodernist poetics in the span of nearly half a century. More broadly, the book’s geocritical and urban analyses of Pynchon’s fiction indicate what might take place concerning the future of urbanism, toward “planetary urbanization” and the formation of the “city region.”

The Literary Beach

The Literary Beach PDF Author: Carsten Meiner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040014135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
As a geo-historical place, the beach integrates a variety of characteristics and functions so multiple that they tend to contradict each other. The beach is both a place of work and trade but also of leisure; it is both a place of therapy and health but also of migration, war, and death; it is a place of mass tourism and boredom but also the place of experiencing the Other; it is a public place but also an uncivilized and desolate place. This book studies the literary representation of the beach from ancient Greek literature up until today, drawing on English, French, Italian, American, and Spanish literatures from various periods and genres and presenting multiple ways of comparing and understanding literary beaches as a ubiquitous literary phenomenon. It demonstrates how the literary beach as a both geo-historical place and as an aesthetic literary commonplace has been a constant and privileged resource for the analysis of more general existential, sociological, and moral problems. This is the case when for instance the Tahitian beach becomes the place of the "already modern" in Stevenson's tales, or when the Italian beach becomes a question of modern feminism in Ferrante. In this sense, literature expands the local or national beach by articulating its transnational complexities.

Planetary Pynchon

Planetary Pynchon PDF Author: Tore Rye Andersen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781009377584
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
While Thomas Pynchon is usually described as an American author who primarily writes about American reality, Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene argues that his major novels, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, can profitably be read as a global trilogy that presents a coherent historical account of how the emergence and spread of European modernity across the world have had devastating consequences for the planet and its inhabitants. This book sets a new agenda in Pynchon studies, charting his early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including globalization's demand for constant growth. It combines close textual readings with broad perspectives on large thematic arcs and stylistic developments across Pynchon's entire career as well as an extensive dialogue with the rich reception of his work.

Reading for the Planet

Reading for the Planet PDF Author: Christian Moraru
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472121324
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In his new book, Christian Moraru argues that post-Cold War culture in general and, in particular, the literature, philosophy, and theory produced since 9/11 foreground an emergent “planetary” imaginary—a “planetarism”—binding in unprecedented ways the world’s peoples, traditions, and aesthetic practices. This imaginary, Moraru further contends, speaks to a world condition (“planetarity”) increasingly exhibited by human expression worldwide. Grappling with the symptoms of planetarity in the arts and the human sciences, the author insists, is a major challenge for today’s scholars—a challenge Reading for the Planet means to address. Thus, Moraru takes decisive steps toward a critical methodology—a “geomethodology”—for dealing with planetarism’s aesthetic and philosophical projections. Here, Moraru analyzes novels by Joseph O’Neill, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorj Chalandon, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and Dai Sijie, among others, as demonstration of his paradigm.

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction PDF Author: Jonathan Elmore
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793619204
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to focus specifically on fiction’s engagements with human driven extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with emerging scholars and traditionally recognized climate fiction ('cli-fi') with texts and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be possible.

Planet Work

Planet Work PDF Author: Ryan Hediger
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 168448460X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.

Pynchon's Against the Day

Pynchon's Against the Day PDF Author: Jeffrey Severs
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1611490650
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades-from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I-and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. Pynchon's Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide offers eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, each addressing a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature.

Angry Planet

Angry Planet PDF Author: Anne Stewart
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452968640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Before the idea of the Anthropocene, there was the angry planet How might we understand an earthquake as a complaint, or erosion as a form of protest—in short, the Earth as an angry planet? Many novels from the end of the millennium did just that, centering around an Earth that acts, moves, shapes human affairs, and creates dramatic, nonanthropogenic change. In Angry Planet, Anne Stewart uses this literature to develop a theoretical framework for reading with and through planetary motion. Typified by authors like Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose work anticipates contemporary critical concepts of entanglement, withdrawal, delinking, and resurgence, angry planet fiction coalesced in the 1990s and delineated the contours of a decolonial ontology. Stewart shows how this fiction brought Black and Indigenous thought into conversation, offering a fresh account of globalization in the 1990s from the perspective of the American Third World, construing it as the era that first made connections among environmental crises and antiracist and decolonial struggles. By synthesizing these major intersections of thought production in the final decades of the twentieth century, Stewart offers a recent history of dissent to the young movements of the twenty-first century. As she reveals, this knowledge is crucial to incipient struggles of our contemporary era, as our political imaginaries grapple with the major challenges of white nationalism and climate change denial.

The Art of Excess

The Art of Excess PDF Author: Tom LeClair
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252061028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description