ABOUT THIS BOOKCelebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America’s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelists
In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis’s collected nonfiction and 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’s legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis’s reputation: Gaddis’s 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. Issues of corporate finance, the American legal system, economics, simulation and authenticity, bureaucracy, transportation, and mass communication permeate his narratives in subject, setting, and method. The essays address subjects as diverse as cybernetics theory, the law, media theory, race and class, music, and the perils and benefits of globalization. The collection also contains a memoir by Gaddis’s son, an unpublished interview with Gaddis from just after the publication of JR, and an essay on the Gaddis archive, newly opened at Washington University in St. Louis.
The editors acknowledge that we live in an age of heightened global awareness. But as these essays testify, few American writers have illuminated as poignantly or incisively just how much the systemic forces of capitalism and mass communication have impacted individual lives and identity—imparting global dimensions to private pursuits and desires—than William Gaddis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYJoseph Tabbi is author of Cognitive Fictions, Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk.
Rone Shavers is a Ph.D candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
REVIEWS“This is the best work on Gaddis since Steven Moore's William Gaddis (1989). Highly recommended.”
—CHOICE
“Paper Empire gathers a fine set of essays on a multi-award winning yet still under-appreciated novelist. . . . Tabbi and Shavers have given us a broad range of essays by American and European scholars, some of them fresh, compelling voices among critics of contemporary fiction and Gaddis’s work.”
—Steven Weisenburger, author of Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South
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“Paper Empire fills the gap in the scholarly literature on Gaddis. I know of no other monograph or collection of essays that addresses in such a focused way the contexts, especially the systematic contexts, of Gaddis’s writing.”
—Brian McHale, author of The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Illustrations 000
Introduction
Joseph Tabbi 000
Part I: Aesthetics
1. An Interview with William Gaddis, circa 1980
Tom LeClair 000
2. In the Diaspora of Words: Gaddis, Kierkegaard, and the Art of
Recognition(s)
Klaus Benesch 000
3. The Collapse of Everything: William Gaddis and the Encyclopedic Novel
Stephen J. Burn 000
4. Gaddis Dialogue Questioned
Joseph McElroy 000
Part II: Systems
5. The Aesthetics of First- and Second-Order Cybernetics in William Gaddis's
J R
Stephen Schryer 000
6. William Gaddis and the Autopoiesis of American Literature
Joseph Tabbi 000
7. Cognitive Gothic: Relevance Theory, Iteration, and Style
Jeff Bursey and Anne Furlong 000
Part III: Capital
8. Critical Mimesis: J R's Transition to Postmodernity
Nicholas Spencer 000
9. Cognitive Map, Aesthetic Object, or National Allegory? Carpenter's Gothic
Nicholas Brown 000
10. The End of Agap<lc e macron>: On the Debates around Gaddis
Rone Shavers 000
Part IV: Media
11. Writing from between the Gaps: Agap<lc e macron> Agape and Twentieth-
Century Media Culture
Michael Wutz 000
12. Mark the Music: J R and Agap<lc e macron> Agape
Anja Zeidler 000
Part V: Biography
13. Valuable Dregs: William Gaddis, the Life of an Artist
Crystal Alberts 000
14. The Secret History of Agap<lc e macron> Agape
Steven Moore 000
Works Cited 000
Contributors 000
Index 000