[…]throughout his writing. In Underworld we meet the “garbage guerilla” turned UCLA cultural studies professor Jesse Detwiler, who lectures his students on the basic maxim of their civilization: “Consume or die” (286-87). While commentators have noted DeLillo’s aversion to American materialism, consumption, and extravagant waste, in Peripheralizing DeLillo, Thomas Travers offers the first systematic reading of political economy in his work. Travers deploys Marxist literary theory under the influence of Fredric Jameson to analyze the crisis in late capitalism’s ceaseless subsumption of markets and its creation of a permanently unemployable underclass, a surplus population. Narrative fiction that represents capitalism’s totalizing […]
[…]threaten’d in this place!” I have plans to explore the Gaddis of contracts further in later critical work, but here, in the limited space of this archive-based piece, let me emphasize the counterintuitive aspects of Gaddis’s criticism of contract law in J R by referring to one of the novel’s most adroit readers. In a 2012 review of J R’s reissue by Dalkey Archive, Lee Konstantinou notes that Gibbs is citing nineteenth-century English jurist Henry Maine’s ideas, in Ancient Law (1861), about the movement from anchoring life in social institutions and their often hierarchical networks (Status) to grounding it in […]
[…]book Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis: “At the time, I was working on a novel with the pretentious title Awake, which I imagine, if it had ever been published, would have put most people asleep. I looked at it a few years ago, and it certainly had its soporific charms. In any case, Gaddis was pleasant and patient with me during our weekly meetings. He made suggestions for editing, and talked generally about my work, but thirty-five years later, I do not remember the specifics. One event I do remember, however, is […]
[…]installing innumerable traffic lights, or anonymous programmers, writing billions of lines of code, have shaped ours. The mound builders must have realized that by rising higher, they were not only able to see further, but understand more deeply the fabric of life they were part of. Using Google EarthPro we can get a intimation of why they revered the bird, soaring above them at 38°39’33.64″N 90°04’27.69″W. But instead of just looking at the pictures, look at the Pro data that makes this view possible: Imagery Date 3/13/2022 38°39’33.64″N 90°04’27.69″W elev 0 ft eye alt 3281 ft Image © 2024 Airbus. […]
[…]leave right away. I perhaps was trying to console myself. And so, I asked him what else he was working on. And he mentioned a couple of writing projects. And then he said, plus, “I want to teach this new workshop using the computer to make stories that can be read in maybe a variety of, infinite numbers of different orders and sequences that you determine as the reader.” And I said, “Oh, you mean hypertext?” And his eyes lit up, and he looked at me, and he said, “You know about this stuff?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I […]
[…]Day of Wrath, came out in 2014. Bob was born in Charles City, Iowa and got his BA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University. He served in the Navy from 1953 to 1957 and then went on to get an MA from the University of Chicago in 1965. He met his wife, Pilar Coover, née Sans Mallafre, who is Catalan, during his time in the Navy, while port-hopping in the Mediterranean. They retained strong attachments to Spain and Catalan Culture, Bob most ardently through his love of soccer, as a supporter of Barcelona, and his interest in Spanish wines of […]