In the zone: perception and presentation of space in German and American ... - Hugo Caviola - Google Books

[ish mailian]

Check out Brian McHale's book _Postmodernist Fiction_, chapter 3, "In
the Zone" where the chapter's epigraph is from GR, but the discussion
begins with older works.

There is Julio Cortazar's zone, William Burroughs's, Alasdair Gray's.
Behind them all lies Apollinaire's poem "Zone" (from Alcools, 1913),
whose speaker, strolling through the immigrant and red-light districts
of Paris, finds in them an objective correlative for modern Europe and
his own marginal, heterogeneous, and outlaw experience. Clearly
derived from Apollinaire's, Cortazar's zone (in 62: A Model Kit, 1968)
is a space of overlapping subjectivities, including shared fantasies
and nightmares, which comes into being whenever his cast of bohemians
and cosmopolitans convenes somewhere in "the DMZ [demilitarized zone]
atmosphere of cafes." Burroughs's zone, or interzone, is a vast,
ramshackle structure in which all the world's architectural styles are
fused and all its races and cultures mingle, the apotheosis of the
Third World shanty-town. Sometimes it is located in Latin America or
North Africa, sometimes (as in The Ticket That Exploded, 1962) on
another planet, sometimes (as in Cities of the Red Night, 1981) in a
lost civilization of the distant past. By contrast, Alasdair Gray's
zone (in Lanark, 1981), a space of paradox modeled on the Wonderland
and Looking-glass worlds of the Alice books, has been displaced to the
ambiguous no man's land between cities. IN THE ZONE 45 Finally,
combining elements of all these postmodernist zones, there is Thomas
Pynchon's zone. "In the Zone," the title....(43-44).

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:51 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Looking up the phrase "In the Zone" in Google Books to check some possible
> resonances from Pynchon, I learned this. Except for a literal use in an old
> astronomy book from 1915...stars in a zone.....Gravity's Rainbow is the
> earliest
> work to use it...(page 4 of my google books search).....
>
> Seems, from a book about,  there was a place outside, around Paris in the
> mid-eighteen hundreds referred to as the Zone, which seems to have been very
> like a preterite
> zone, a Nighttown zone, ala my recent post.
>
> From Google Books, there is no indication that later (than GR ) uses of In
> the Zone--
> that famous psychological meaning [with Flow] or in golf and anything else
> existed (in books) before GR and before the time of GR.
>
> Here is a scholarly book that starts with using Pynchon's phrase.....
>
>
>
>
> https://books.google.com/books?id=3qJZAAAAMAAJ&q=%22In+the+zone%22&dq=%22In+the+zone%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRm5TZoMfKAhUFvYMKHeTEBxo4KBDoAQgiMAA
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l