Title: Capitalist Mysticism and the Historicizing of 9/11 in Thomas Pynchon’s<i>Bleeding Edge</i>
Abstract:This article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge ...This article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013). It suggests that the concerns of postmodern writers and theorists came to dominate interpretations of 9/11 (practiced most successfully by Don DeLillo in Falling Man) and, in doing so, severed its connection to deeper historical trajectories. At the heart of the postmodernist fallacy is the same privileging of discourse over materiality typified by utopian conceptions of the Internet. In Bleeding Edge, this utopia takes the form of DeepArcher: a "Deep Web" paradise infiltrated by suspicious forces during the 9/11 attacks. The intermingling of espionage, the tech industry, and the response to 9/11 in Pynchon's novel foregrounds the ambiguities of digital modernity in a way yet to be recognized by most writers and theorists of the contemporary.Read More
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-05-13
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 9
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