Introduction 1. Mao II: Pre-Figurations of Terrorist Temporality 2. The Futurity of the 10th of September 3. Beckett's Proust and Falling Man 4. Intimate Time: The Limits of Temporality in Point Omega 5. Pre-Cursors to Pynchon's Reconsideration of Temporality in Gravity's Rainbow 6. The Duration of Thomas Pynchon's Hell 7. Pynchon's Futurist Manifesto 8. Inherent Vice and the Chronotope Conclusion Works CitedIndex
Reading the major works of Pynchon and DeLillo, Gourley argues for time as the crucial issue re-emerging in the ruins of the 21st century.
James Gourley is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and member of the Writing and Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Gourley has made an important contribution to our understanding of
the work of two of the most important and most demanding of
contemporary American novelists... Tracing some of the influences
on these two writers, including Marinetti, Beckett and Proust, and
drawing on relevant theoretical arguments, Gourley offers a fresh
and illuminating account of their fiction before and after the
attack. -- Derek Attridge, University of York, USA
In this remarkable book, James Gourley argues that the 9/11
terrorist attacks threw down a series of challenges: to the
perceived position of the United States in the world, to our
understanding of time and temporality, and to the notion of art in
general and the novel in particular as an adequate and appropriate
register of reality. Gourley shows how his two chosen authors, Don
DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, responded to these challenges in
related but also significantly different ways. He reveals the
continuities between their work written before and then after 9/11
and also the radical changes the terrorist attacks effectively
compelled. Above all, he shows just how the trauma of 11th of
September 2001 made these two writers reassess their work and their
field and devise a new template for literature. Theoretically
informed and critically astute, Terrorism and Temporality in the
Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo represents a
significant addition to the growing field of 9/11studies. It is
indispensable reading for anyone interested in that field or in the
work of these two major American authors-or, for that matter, in
the larger issue of the relationship between politics and
aesthetics, historical crisis and literary form. It also offers
invaluable insights into the enigma of authorship, just how writers
manage to speak the unspeakable. -- Richard Gray, FBA, Professor,
Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of
Essex, UK, and author A Brief History of American Literature and
After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11
The second plane hovers like Zeno's Arrow before impact with the
South Tower, and time changes. In Terrorism and Temporality in
the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, James Gourley
tracks the shift from cyber-capital's measurement of time in
nanoseconds to the convergence of temporality in the Omega Point.
Pynchon and DeLillo are our two most time-sensitive novelists, and
Gourley deftly shows how their world, and ours, is changed utterly
by the events of 9/11. -- Joseph M. Conte, Professor of English,
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA
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