“Falling into the sky”: gravity and levity in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

My argument follows geographer Gunnar Olsson when he asks “What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpreting of a line? And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects?” Using Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon about the drawing of the Mason-Dixon line, I explore how the mapmaker’s productive power is never merely reflective but generative too, constructing a world as much as representing one. I question the consequent relation between “above and below,” drawing on Farinelli’s insight that critique of such constructions must recognise an antagonistic humour in the production of maps and territories. Pynchon’s novel, I argue, is exemplary in the wit with which it pits the anomalous, strange and contingent phenomena of the below against the homogenising, categorising power of above. His approach helps us understand the dark heart of Enlightenment cartography and society

Vejen til 1984

Thomas Pynchon skriver lærd og engageret om George Orwells fremtidsroman 1984, og i sin gennemgang af romanens temaer drager han en række diskrete og tankevækkende paralleller til vores egen historiske situation

"Death Itself Shall Be Deathless”: Transrationalism and Eternal Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

The status of human mortality in the face of rapid and overwhelming scientific and technological change is by no means a new topic in DeLillo’s fiction. For many critics, death fulfills a crucial function in the author’s work, its very possibility operating to maintain the boundaries of time and space that are otherwise under threat of disappearance in post war culture. Don DeLillo’s eighteenth novel, Zero K (2016), offers an augmented examination of this conjunction between death and technology, depicting an industrial and scientific landscape where fantasies of eternal life can be legitimately realized via radical advances in cryonic technologies. Yet rather than circumventing death and prolonging life as intended, this article argues that DeLillo instead presents cryonic freezing as a form of eternal death. Subsumed within the technological matrix, death’s ineluctability is disturbed and remodulated, meaning that temporal and spatial boundaries become violently unhinged and entirely immeasurable. This boundlessness becomes vividly mirrored in the architectural and temporal logic of the “Convergence” facility itself, a “transrational” space that unravels concepts such as time, space, language, and subjectivity