Orbit (Cambridge)最新文献

{"title":"Friction Problems: William Gaddis’ Corporate Writing and the Stylistic Origins of J R","authors":"Ali Chetwynd","doi":"10.16995/orbit.1996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1996","url":null,"abstract":"William Gaddis’ corporate writing in the years between his first two novels was as important to J R’s (1975) formal innovations as to its business-world plot. While previous J R criticism has dealt in formal tropes of flatness, depth, and flow, the corporate writing preserved in Gaddis’ archive offers grounds for reading the novel’s plot andstyle through the related but under-examined concept of friction. Through various archival discoveries, I sketch the case for a friction-centric reading of J R. I show what Gaddis’ work in the slide-show medium and assembling speeches out of contradictory source material contributed to the novel’s sentence-level innovations in style, and finally offer a style-driven re-reading of the novel’s overall narrative design. While Gaddis’ corporate work taught him techniques for eliminating traces of ideological friction, J R’s formal innovations first draw on those techniques to establish a world that tends toward frictionlessness, then invert them to restore friction within that world’s terms.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43198761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William Gaddis’ Education-Writing and His Fiction: A Fuller Archival History","authors":"Ali Chetwynd","doi":"10.16995/orbit.1995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1995","url":null,"abstract":"The little use that critics of William Gaddis’ fiction have previously made of his corporate writing career has concerned a very limited portion of its history: the fact that his cancelled book on classroom TV for the Ford Foundation contributed material to J R’s school-centric plot. Gaddis’ own dismissive retrospective account of the interest and significance of his corporate work has constrained critical investigation. The archive, though, reveals a close, sustained relationship between his corporate work and fiction. This article sets out their linked histories and surveys the archival material that future discussions of the relation between Gaddis’ corporate and artistic careers will need to take account of.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47839217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Reviews","authors":"Andrea Pitozzi, Crystal Alberts, G. Maragos, M. Rohland, P. Whitmarsh, S. Mcclintock, Sergej Macura, Z. Thornton","doi":"10.16995/orbit.1810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1810","url":null,"abstract":"The end of the Cold War raised hopes among many democratic and human rights activists that a new era of openness and accountability in global affairs was possible. Just as the end of both World Wars led to the emergence of new social movements for radical political change and national liberation, there was hope that as the bipolar politics that had dominated world affairs for several decades receded, new movements could emerge to confront challenging economic and social problems. Perhaps the high point of this period, from a North American perspective at least, was the 1999 Seattle uprising against the World Trade Organization. But the moment proved to be shortlived, as the events of 9/11 reminded the world of both the continuing appeal of authoritarian politics to many in the developing world, as well as the inherent tendency of Western powers to surrender civil liberties in the face of dangers that are frequently overblown. Thus, if the Cold War is indeed now only a memory, it is very much the case that authoritarianism remains a potent force in world politics. A reconsideration of the roots of today’s political circumstances in the Cold War, then, would be very welcome. This collection, edited by historian Jessica Stites Mor, promises such a reconsideration yet quickly finds itself justifying a new version of the authoritarianism that undermined many opponents of Western imperial power during the Cold War. As perhaps the most obvious example, the book contains not one but two chapters (out of nine) dedicated to the argument that there is, or at least was, something fundamentally progressive about Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Russell Cobb, writing about cultural issues, appears to believe that “initially” the Cuban Revolution was a breath-taking inspiration to Latin American artists, only to “turn [at some unspecified date after January 1959] dogmatic and authoritarian.”1 In other words, for Cobb, the Revolution began as a progressive experiment that turned bad. He even suggests, without foundation, that the “revolution in the region’s politics . . . stemm[ed] from Cuba.”2 This is an odd conclusion in light of the book’s stated aim of exploring a new alternative “transnational solidarity from below.”3 It is true, of course, that the Cuban Revolution was influential across Latin America, but different actors drew different lessons from the experience. In Nicaragua, for example, the events were mostly influential in encouraging dangerous new forms of guerilla warfare by liberals and radicals alike that endangered broader forms of democratic movements opposed to the Somoza dictatorship. It","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44009216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Maus on Contemporary Literary Dissenters, Coffman on Religion and Postmodernism, Di Leo on Big Little Magazines Maus on Contemporary Literary Dissenters, Coffman on Religion and Postmodernism, Di Leo on Big Little Magazines","authors":"Christopher K. Coffman, Derek C. Maus, J. Leo","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.1349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.1349","url":null,"abstract":"Review Essays on Recent Scholarship: Maus on Contemporary Literary Dissenters; Coffman on Religion and Postmodernism; Di Leo on Big Little Magazines","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48481331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Desperately Seeking David: Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace","authors":"M. Miley","doi":"10.16995/orbit.813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.813","url":null,"abstract":"The power of David Foster Wallace’s narrative persona has only increased since his death in 2008; however, his early fiction presents alternate perspectives on authorial presence beyond the commonly accepted discourse on Wallace. A closer look at the authorial poses in The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair challenges the tidiness of a narrative that privileges sincerity at the expense of a discussion of such a notion’s assumptions and blind spots. In contrast to this narrative, Wallace pursues modes of authorship based in concealment throughout Broom and Girl, hiding his presence via a variety of boundaries, masks, queer personas, crosswriting, and imitative voices, to wildly varying degrees of success. In place of an intimate sense of presence, readers of these works receive a very different conception of authorship that crafts a series of imperial personas that adopt totalizing and phallocentric authorial positions that linger throughout Wallace’s body of work. However, several stories in Girl not commonly discussed in Wallace scholarship experiment with another, more present and intimate mode of authorship that rejects gimmicky authorial masks and dead authors and instead develops an author figure whose persona is convex, reaching outward toward the reader in hope of colliding with them rather than absorbing them.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47440709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postmodern Sublime in Context","authors":"Joseph Tabbi","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.1387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.1387","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph Tabbi, who has a chapter of his own in the volume, Pynchon in Context (Cambridge 2018), corrects two citational errors in this same volume. Both mischaracterize, by reading out of context a sentence in Tabbi's 1995 monograph, Postmodern Sublime (Cornell University Press). Because Tabbi's arguments are thought (wrongly) to support an \"old argument\" in Pynchon criticism, Tabbi brings this misreading to the attention of contemporary literature scholars, before the wrong impression becomes general knowledge.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44795564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nose-gaping: The Smells of Mason & Dixon The Smells of Mason & Dixon","authors":"M. Phillips","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.768","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.768","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44396162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blood on the Tracks Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, and (Un)popular Music from Britney to Black Metal","authors":"Samuel Thomas","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.788","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores Pynchon’s allusions to popular (and unpopular) music in Bleeding Edge (2013). I argue that Pynchon’s engagement with music can not only be understood in terms of its periodizing function but also as an intricate practice of historical and prophetic/proleptic layering. This practice compellingly highlights some of the ways in which music is both uniquely subversive and uniquely vulnerable to co-optation. In doing so, Pynchon’s fiction resonates with much-debated critiques of popular music by theorists such as Attali and Adorno, while at the same time significantly departing from them. The analysis ranges across the novel’s sonic extremes, from the inescapable mega-hits of Britney Spears to the infamous Norwegian black metal scene. It uses a strategically-chosen selection of tracks as ports of entry into the “musical unconscious” (Julius Greve and Sascha Pohlmann's term). Combining immersive close work on Bleeding Edge with extended discussions of the musical worlds beyond the novel's immediate parameters, the article ultimately moves towards a more expansive thesis: Music, I contend, can tell us as much about Pynchon as Pynchon does about music.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45134788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Kairotic View of History in Thomas Pynchon's Novels","authors":"Gary B. Thompson","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.589","url":null,"abstract":"The Kairotic View of History in Thomas Pynchon's NovelsThe rhetorical concept of kairos (right timing, right proportion, time viewed qualitatively) can expand the understanding of the \"points\" or decisive moments in Pynchon's historical novels. In addition to timeliness, kairos for theologians represents the intersection of the sacred with the profane. Kairos also provides insight into the novels' affect, lending rhetorical force to the concept from Marx that \"the point is to change [history].\" Following the hiatus preceding Vineland, Pynchon's global view of history becomes more restricted, with emphasis instead on smaller social enclaves and human connections.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42190604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Getting the Story Joan Didion's Aesthetic Transformation","authors":"Sam Diamond","doi":"10.16995/ORBIT.495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ORBIT.495","url":null,"abstract":"Many contemporary readings of Joan Didion, not to mention her public profile, present her early journalism as her crowning achievement. Works such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are venerated as definitive Didion texts. However, Didion's work, in particular her journalism and memoir, underwent a radical change following these texts. This change can be witnessed in the transformation of Didion's style and politics between Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her later work, which often appeared in the New York Review of Books under the editorial guidance of the late Robert B. Silvers. This article tracks this change, identifying Didion's move away from surety and an objective voice towards ambivalence, subjectivity and nuance in search of a specific ideal of truth. I argue that the development of Didion's style, both aesthetic and poetic, reflects a political evolution and a reconstitution of what it might mean to approach truth on a personal and journalistic level, and this has a particular resonance given present conversations around truth in journalism and politics.","PeriodicalId":37450,"journal":{"name":"Orbit (Cambridge)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45262257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}