The article discusses transformations in William Gibson’s employment of the theme and poetics of ... more The article discusses transformations in William Gibson’s employment of the theme and poetics of the Wunderkammer from his two early novels, Neuromancer (1984) and Count Zero (1987), to Zero History (2010), his last-but-one novel. The exploration of Gibson’s representations of various Wunderkammer collections and arrangements in these books reveals his ever more pronounced recourse, over time, to the culture of curiosity as a diagnostic instrument. By interrogating the changing function of the Wunderkammer in Gibsons’ oeuvre, along with all its early-modern and contemporary associations with curiosity, it is possible to tease out the complexity of the writer’s evolving view of the duality, and the fusion, of the digital and the material, as well as his keen understanding of how the late capitalist market functions. Through his diagnostic representations of various cabinets of curiosities, Gibson reverses tendencies governing the transformations of the Wunderkammer as a collection of...
The December 1995 discussion of Bianca's age on pynchon-I, an Internet discussion group (at w... more The December 1995 discussion of Bianca's age on pynchon-I, an Internet discussion group (at www.waste.org ), shows that a deep concern about child molesting makes readers worry about whether child characters are presented as sexually abused. However, this preoccupation with sexual molestation is only the tip of the iceberg, because Pynchon deals with an abuse of the child more deeply ingrained in our rational and scientific Western culture. The images of children and childhood in Gravity's Rainbow can be interpreted as a reflection on the use of the child as the Other, the use which consists of reducing an archetype to a signifier.
In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel draws our attention to an (apparently) obvious fact: &qu... more In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel draws our attention to an (apparently) obvious fact: "Books declare themselves through their titles, their authors, their places in a catalogue or on a bookshelf, the illustrations on their jackets." He announces with gusto, "I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape" (125). Indeed, the cover of Blissful Bewilderment is intriguing and elicits an immediate flash of recognition from a reader of Pynchon. A warm, deep-sepia background identifiable as a segment of an old map of North America sets off a cold, bluish-gray iris, part of which is a clock face. The clockwork eye subtly emphasizes the connection between the book, whose editors and nearly all its contributors are Scandinavians, and a Scandinavian motif in Pynchon's oeuvre. After all, the last trace of V.'s clockwork artificial eye leads Stencil to Stockholm. On the other hand, the cover image of the eye may well be seen as the reader's guide to the tenor of the essays collected in Blissful Bewilderment.
The article discusses transformations in William Gibson’s employment of the theme and poetics of ... more The article discusses transformations in William Gibson’s employment of the theme and poetics of the Wunderkammer from his two early novels, Neuromancer (1984) and Count Zero (1987), to Zero History (2010), his last-but-one novel. The exploration of Gibson’s representations of various Wunderkammer collections and arrangements in these books reveals his ever more pronounced recourse, over time, to the culture of curiosity as a diagnostic instrument. By interrogating the changing function of the Wunderkammer in Gibsons’ oeuvre, along with all its early-modern and contemporary associations with curiosity, it is possible to tease out the complexity of the writer’s evolving view of the duality, and the fusion, of the digital and the material, as well as his keen understanding of how the late capitalist market functions. Through his diagnostic representations of various cabinets of curiosities, Gibson reverses tendencies governing the transformations of the Wunderkammer as a collection of...
The December 1995 discussion of Bianca's age on pynchon-I, an Internet discussion group (at w... more The December 1995 discussion of Bianca's age on pynchon-I, an Internet discussion group (at www.waste.org ), shows that a deep concern about child molesting makes readers worry about whether child characters are presented as sexually abused. However, this preoccupation with sexual molestation is only the tip of the iceberg, because Pynchon deals with an abuse of the child more deeply ingrained in our rational and scientific Western culture. The images of children and childhood in Gravity's Rainbow can be interpreted as a reflection on the use of the child as the Other, the use which consists of reducing an archetype to a signifier.
In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel draws our attention to an (apparently) obvious fact: &qu... more In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel draws our attention to an (apparently) obvious fact: "Books declare themselves through their titles, their authors, their places in a catalogue or on a bookshelf, the illustrations on their jackets." He announces with gusto, "I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape" (125). Indeed, the cover of Blissful Bewilderment is intriguing and elicits an immediate flash of recognition from a reader of Pynchon. A warm, deep-sepia background identifiable as a segment of an old map of North America sets off a cold, bluish-gray iris, part of which is a clock face. The clockwork eye subtly emphasizes the connection between the book, whose editors and nearly all its contributors are Scandinavians, and a Scandinavian motif in Pynchon's oeuvre. After all, the last trace of V.'s clockwork artificial eye leads Stencil to Stockholm. On the other hand, the cover image of the eye may well be seen as the reader's guide to the tenor of the essays collected in Blissful Bewilderment.
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