Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels

[Martin Eve]

Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels

Tore Rye Andersen

Taking Horace Engdahl’s critique of the insularity of American 
literature as its starting point, the essay goes on to discuss Richard 
Gray’s and Michael Rothberg’s recent articles in American Literary 
History, both of which call for a literature capable of addressing the 
contemporary global reality. While both Gray and Rothberg claim that 
such a literature has yet to be written, the essay argues that Thomas 
Pynchon’s three novels Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the 
Day can profitably be read together as an ambitiously conceived 
world-historical trilogy which tells the story of the gestation and 
emergence of our contemporary global reality.

Published in Orbit. http://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.178
-- 
Dr. Martin Paul Eve
Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing
Birkbeck, University of London

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