[…]on the other hand, was not inclined to read his contemporaries. Steven Moore writes that “[h]e seemed to have little interest in the novels of those contemporaries with whom he is most often associated,” including Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, John Hawkes, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon. “William H. Gass was an exception,” says Moore, “whom he admired both personally and professionally” (William Gaddis 13). At the tribute to her father in 1999, Sarah Gaddis said, “William Gass was important to Gaddis. . . . He held Gass in the highest esteem for his work, and no other writer […]
[…]discussions Americana, Ratner’s Star, White Noise, Mao II, and The Body Artist. DeLillo’s latest novel, The Silence (2020), which reinforces the last chapter’s assertion of stasis and the cessation of cybercapital, presumably arrived too late for discussion here. While a Marxist reading of a simulacral economy in White Noise or Warhol’s commodification of the image in Mao II (his serigraphs are a featured exhibit in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) would be welcome, Travers makes compelling analyses of DeLillo’s prolonged confrontation with capitalism and his apperception of the dispossessed multitude from early to late in his […]
[…]the seasons, especially day and night…. But setting out from Chicago, the ‘During’ was yet to come. Following the cycles laid down by planetary motions as our solar system developed, there’s a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth every 18 months. And we’ve all seen images of them. Most look like they were taken with scientific intent, with filters, and magnification. But none of those images can compare to the total eclipse as an all-enveloping experience from horizon to horizon, and nadir to zenith. No picture can capture the experience of being in the artificiality of the light, the surreal […]