Apter: Paranoia as a World System

[jbor at bigpond.com]

A really interesting essay, takes Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems 
theory as its starting point and focuses in particular on Pynchon (Lot 
49 mainly) and DeLillo (and Derrida). Well worth reading.

'On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System'
by Emily Apter. _American Literary History_ 18.2, New York, Summer 
2006, pp. 365-389.

Excerpt:
[...] While American literature is far from being the only national 
literature to privilege paranoid psychosis—think of Gogol's The Nose, 
Kafka's The Trial, and more recently, the novel Links (2004) by 
Somalian author Nuruddin Farah, and the novel Europeana: A Brief 
History of the Twentieth Century (2001) by Czech novelist Patrik 
Ouredník, which compresses every historical factoid, cliché, and idée 
reçue into a single globular chronotype -- paranoia consistently 
emerges as a preeminent topos in major works of the post-World War II 
American canon. Taken together, Thomas Pynchon's V (1963), The Crying 
of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Don DeLillo's The Names 
(1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld 
(1997), John Kennedy O'Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Philip 
Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), and William T. Vollmann's 
fictional panoplies of conquest and fear in American history (from the 
Seven Dreams project to his polemical magnum opus Rising Up and Rising 
Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means [2003]) 
suggest narrative articulations of oneworldedness that enshrine 
paranoia as the preferred trope of national allegory. Pynchon remains 
the catalyst; his invention of a literature of conspiracy steeped in 
the ethos of CIA operatives, McCarthyism, cybernetics, and 
hallucinogenic drugs takes paranoia beyond Cold War spy fiction and 
into the realm of a new literarity. [...]

Pdf available offlist.

best