Lines of Flight

[Dave Monroe]

Hot off the press ...

Mattessich, Stefan.  Lines of Flight: Discursive
   Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of
   Thomas Pynchon.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of
late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial
complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and
specialization in the workplace, standardization at
all levels of social life, and the growing influence
of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the
way human beings experience time and duration.
Focusing on Pynchon's novels as representative
artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich
analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not
only to Pynchon's work but also to its literary,
cultural, and theoretical contexts

Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective
displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and
farce deployed through Pynchon's oeuvre. In
particular, he is interested in showing how this sense
of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and
1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of
flight or escape, and exposing the beliefs behind it,
Mattessich argues that the counterculture's rejection
of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of
self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the
counterculture found itself defined by the very order
it sought to escape. He points to parallels in
Pynchon's attempts to dramatize and enact a similar
experience of time in the doubling-back,
criss-crossing, and erasures of his writing. Linking
this to the problem of what Henri LeFebvre called
"grammatological terrorism"—the problem of being
trapped within discourses that dictate conditions of
possibility and deep structures of belief—Mattessich
lays out a theory of cultural production centered on
the ethical necessity of grasping one's own
susceptibility to discursive forms of determination. 

http://www.dukeupress.edu/index.shtml

http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0822329948

The URL is a bit on the long side, so "Search" by
author/title instead.  No mention of Slow Learner, at
least not in the index, but see as well ...

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.997/review-5.997

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.598/8.3mattessich.txt

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inegs/Ekphrasis.htm

http://homepage.smc.edu/mattessich_stefan/

Okay, HOPING to get to hosting tonight, but ...

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