Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817354069 ISBN 13: 9780817354060

Publisher: University of Alabama Press, 2007

Synopsis

In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis' collected nonfiction, his final novel, and Jonathan Franzen's lengthy attack on him in ""The New Yorker"", a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis' legacy. In a review in ""The London Review of Books"", critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis' reputation: Gaddis' unique hybridity, his ability to ""write in the gap between two dispensations,"" between science and literature, theory and narrative, and ""different orders of linguistic imagination."" Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels - ""The Recognitions"", ""JR"", ""Carpenter's Gothic"", and ""A Frolic of His Own"" - are notable in the ways that they often restrict themselves to the language and communication systems of the worlds he portrays. Issues of corporate finance, the American legal system, economics, simulation and authenticity, bureaucracy, transportation, and mass communication permeate his narratives in subject, setting, and method. The essays address subjects as diverse as cybernetics, the law, media theory, race and class, music, and the perils and benefits of globalization. The collection also contains an unpublished interview with Gaddis from just after the publication of ""JR"" and an essay on the Gaddis archive, newly opened at Washington University in St. Louis.

About this title

Review:

Paper Empire fills the gap in the scholarly literature on Gaddis. I know of no other monograph or collection of essays that addresses in such a focused way the contexts, especially the systematic contexts, of Gaddis's writing. - Brian McHale, author of The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems

About the Author:

Joseph Tabbi is author of Cognitive Fictions and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Rone Shavers is a Ph.D candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0817354069
• ISBN 13: 9780817354060
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Tabbi Joseph, Shavers Rone