Not Altogether Human : Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance

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Total Timescaping: The Modernist Moment in Pynchon’s “Against the Day”

In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon’s formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes postmodernism, yet also is predicated on an abolition of sequential time and cause and effect, which might reflect a modernist decentering of space, time, and gravity. Pynchon’s modernism dramatizes the idea that linear time no longer exists – that our time and space are no longer the center of the universe, much as conscious individual thought no longer is the center of subjectivity. Periods, literary or grammatical, also fall by the wayside. This decentering of time also is associated with modernist science and ontology, which paradoxically put modernism back at the center of an aesthetic without a center. Modernism functions as the narrative equivalent of relativity, yet also of quantum theory, because all spaces and time emerge and exist at once, in a process that Pynchon refers to as bilocation. Modernist connection then veers into concurrence. At least heuristically, Pynchon also treats the modernist project as a form of doubling and repetition. As a result, Pynchon situates modernism and World War I as precursors to their successor, postmodernism and World War II, without directly addressing them, yet somehow also as co-existing with them; both are doubled though repetitions that rewrite the originals. Pynchon situates modernism as an ethos of echoes, but a repetition without an original. A kind of quilting point, modernism becomes a contradictory master term that still explains everything, a lens through which all else is seen.In his novel Against the Day, Pynchon’s formulation of modernism anticipates and even subsumes postmodernism, yet also is predicated on an abolition of sequential time and cause and effect, which might reflect a modernist decentering of space, time, and gravity. Pynchon’s modernism dramatizes the idea that linear time no longer exists – that our time and space are no longer the center of the universe, much as conscious individual thought no longer is the center of subjectivity. Periods, literary or grammatical, also fall by the wayside. This decentering of time also is associated with modernist science and ontology, which paradoxically put modernism back at the center of an aesthetic without a center. Modernism functions as the narrative equivalent of relativity, yet also of quantum theory, because all spaces and time emerge and exist at once, in a process that Pynchon refers to as bilocation. Modernist connection then veers into concurrence. At least heuristically, Pynchon also treats the modernist project as a form of doubling and repetition. As a result, Pynchon situates modernism and World War I as precursors to their successor, postmodernism and World War II, without directly addressing them, yet somehow also as co-existing with them; both are doubled though repetitions that rewrite the originals. Pynchon situates modernism as an ethos of echoes, but a repetition without an original. A kind of quilting point, modernism becomes a contradictory master term that still explains everything, a lens through which all else is seen

Amnesia of Death: The Unsettled Endings of the Dead Who Don’t Know They’re Dead

In this essay, I try to explicate the recent prominence of texts and films that feature protagonists whose memories have been erased, and particularly who don’t remember their own histories, and especially the paradoxical fact that they have died. These often traumatized figures—who need a designation, and whom we might call the nescient dead (“ND”)—are not zombies; they simply don’t realize that they are dead or exist in a repetitive flux between what Lacan termed the two deaths. Many of these narratives update a Modernist sense of belatedness, reflecting our anxiety that something has already ended, but we haven’t acknowledged it yet.Cet article essaye d’expliquer le succès récent de textes et de films mettant en scène des personnages dont la mémoire a été effacée et, plus spécifiquement, ceux qui ne se rappellent plus de leurs histoires et en particulier leur propre mort. Ces figures souvent traumatisées – que l’on désignera ici sous le nom de « nescient dead » (« ND ») – ne sont pas des zombies. Ils ne se rendent pas compte qu’ils sont morts ou qu’ils existent dans un état transitionnel mais répétitif, pris dans ce que Lacan nomme « l’entre-deux morts ». Une grande partie de ces récits mettent à jour le sentiment moderniste de retard, qui fait écho l’angoisse face à quelque chose de déjà fini mais que nous n’avons pas encore reconnu

Bad Company: The Corporate Appropriation of Nature, Divinity, and Personhood in U.S. Culture

In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature