Rushing: Am I Paranoid Enough?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Nice little companion piece to Emily Apter's essay:

'Am I Paranoid Enough?'
by Robert A Rushing
_American Literary History_ 18.2, New York, Summer 2006, pp. 390-393, 
395.

Pdfs available offlist.

best

On 01/06/2006:

> 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. [...]