Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason &amp; Dixon

Burns, Christy L.

doi:10.1353/pmc.2003.0033

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…is affiliated with a right-wing neo-liberal economics that encourages competition and diversity of service in a bid to implement trickle-down policies. However, in TCoL49, the network is used by those who are either doubly politically affiliated or politically outcast: the Peter Pinguid Society; a 'facially deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness'; a live child who longs for his own pre-natal abortion; a black woman who goes through 'rituals of miscarriage'; and a voyeur who does not know the object of his voyeurism, among others (85). Each of these instances of W.A.S.T.E.…”

Section: Whereof We Can Speakmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The action is, then, situated at the junction of three temporal points: Dixon's supposed 1755 attack, Wicks Cherrycoke's 1786 (MD, 6) post-revolutionary war storytelling and Pynchon's late twentieth-century perspective, the convergence of which Christy L. Burns has called Pynchon's 'parallactic method'. 85 For a Foucauldian temporal specificity, this has interesting consequences.…”

Section: Time and Time Againmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pynchon and philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

2014

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My thanks are due: first and foremost, to Peter Boxall and Doug Haynes for all their insight and wisdom. I would also like to thank Derek Attridge and Pam Thurschwell for their invaluable feedback on this book. Within the English department at Sussex I would particularly like to thank Vicky Lebeau for her unceasing support on various projects.To Sam Thomas for his constant warm-spirited generosity. To all who have encouraged me in the launch of Orbit and my study of Pynchon, but particularly to

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Section: Whereof We Can Speakmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Time and Time Againmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pynchon and philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

2014

Choice Reviews Online

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Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

Herman

2015

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Engaging Foundational Narratives in Morrison’s Paradise and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

Schell¹

2014

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This essay examines how Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon construct foundational narratives as critiques of national imaginings. Setting up the idea of the nation as imagined communities coming together through shared narratives, Morrison and Pynchon probe the possibility of future national imaginings through narratives which continually breakdown in establishing the past. In the seeming paradox of narrating pasts that destroy and delimit the future, their novels display the disjuncture between the need to narrate the nation and the collective narratives that often emerge to define national boundaries. Their texts point toward the limits of national imaginings and spaces that unsuccessfully map onto the populations they purport to represent. In the context of the transnational turn in American studies, foundational narratives signal national narratives as self-destructive operations of power that can compel a populace to construct space–less histories and obscure social relations. Simultaneously, foundational narratives can also signal spaces beyond national boundaries, understandings of the nation as transnational and reliant on fictional modes in order to reestablish historical and social links.

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Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Pynchon and philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

Pynchon and philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno

Engaging Foundational Narratives in Morrison’s Paradise and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

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