Pynchon's Against the Day A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide

by Severs, Jeffrey; Leise, Christopher; Benton, Graham; Coffman, Christopher K.; Dalsgaard, Inger H.; Elias, Amy J.; Hume, Kathryn; Kevorkian, Martin; McHale, Brian; McKetta, Elisabeth; Narkunas, J Paul; Piekarski, Krzysztof; Reilly, Terry; Clair, Justin St.

• ISBN13: 9781611490640
• ISBN10: 1611490642
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-24
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Summary

Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse but energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers more than a decade -- 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 concerns. 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 contribution to Pynchon's already impressive body of works, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature. This volume includes essays by Graham Benton, Christopher K. Coffman, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Amy Elias, Kathryn Hume, Martin Kevorkian, Brian McHale, Elisabeth McKetta, Paul Narkunas, Krzysztof Piekarski, Terry Reilly, Jeffrey Severs, Justin St. Clair, as well as an introduction by Christopher Leise.

Author Biography

Jeffrey Severs is assistant professor in the English department at the University of British Columbia. Christopher Leise is assistant professor of English at Whitman College. He is coeditor of, and a contributor to, William Gaddis, The Last of Something: Critical Essays.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Notes on the Text	p. ix
Introduction: ôExceeding the Usual Three Dimensionsö: Collective Visions of the Unsuspected	p. 1
Narrative Strategies
Genre as History: Pynchon's Genre-Poaching	p. 15
Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day	p. 29
Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon's Antitragic Vision	p. 47
Binocular Disparity and Pynchon's Panoramic Paradigm	p. 67
Science, Belief, and Faith
Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and Spatial Grounds of Pynchon's Ecological Ethic	p. 91
Readers and Trespassers: Time Travel, Orthogonal Time, and Alternative Figurations of Time in Against the Day	p. 115
Narrating Tesla in Against the Day	p. 139
Politics and Economics
The Religious and Political Vision of Against the Day	p. 167
Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day	p. 191
ôThe abstractions she was instructed to embodyö: Women, Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day	p. 215
Europe's ôEastern Questionö and the United States' ôWestern Questionö: Representing Ethnic Wars in Against the Day	p. 239
Works Cited	p. 265
Index	p. 279
About the Editors	p. 289
About the Contributors	p. 291
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