Paper Empire
Author | : Joseph Tabbi |
Publisher | : University of Alabama Press |
Total Pages | : 303 |
Release | : 2007 |
ISBN-10 | : 9780817354060 |
ISBN-13 | : 0817354069 |
Rating | : 4/5 (60 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: 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.