fictions present

After noting how J R was a reflection of postmodern society and antiheroic traditions in America in the 1970s, Lalita Kashoba Mohan signals a similar postmodern turn in her homeland, India, and other countries "whose economic development is now following America’s earlier path."

Elliot Yates examines Gaddis’s first corporate writing assignment, with the company Textron, which seems to coincide directly with his first conception of the plot for J R. Textron was one of the first US corporations to explicitly pursue conglomerate “diversification” through buying up seemingly unrelated businesses, and Yates shows how this not only helped generate the plot of J R, but functions as a key to understanding its formal design.

Translator Francine Ozaki reads The Recognitions through the overarching debates of twentieth-century translation theory, finding the conflict between Wyatt’s and Otto’s handling of Forgery, Originality, and Authenticity illuminating the concerns of today's professional translators. Questions of credit, treachery, allegiance, payment, and dependency are so fully addressed in the novel that translators and translation theorists should be reading it to help make sense of their own artistic and professional roles.

Further memories from yet another student of William Gaddis during the time when WG taught at Bard.

Scott Zieher offers some creative non-fiction in praise of perhaps Gaddis’s least-lauded publication: the lavishly illustrated and sample-provisioned “masterwork of printed ephemera” A Pile Fabric Primer. How did this mysterious document come to be, and what does it tell us about the creative writer's working conditions?