Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Critics of American exceptionalism usually view it as a destructive force eroding the radical energies of social movements and aesthetic practices. In A Desire Called America, Christian P. Haines confronts a troubling paradox: Some of the most provocative political projects in the United States are remarkably invested in American exceptionalism. Riding a strange current of U.S. literature that draws on American exceptionalism only to overturn it in the name of utopian desire, Haines reveals a tradition of viewing the United States as a unique and exemplary political model while rejecting exceptionalism’s commitments to nationalism, capitalism, and individualism. Through Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon, Haines brings to light a radically different version of the American dream—one in which political subjects value an organization of social life that includes democratic self-governance, egalitarian cooperation, and communal property. A Desire Called America brings utopian studies and the critical discourse of biopolitics to bear upon each other, suggesting that utopia might be less another place than our best hope for confronting authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and a resurgent exclusionary nationalism.

Utopias --- American exceptionalism. --- Biopolitics. --- Commons. --- Emily Dickinson. --- Thomas Pynchon. --- Utopia. --- Walt Whitman. --- William Burroughs.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.

Global environmental change. --- Leisure --- Work --- Philosophy. --- work, jobs, labor, environment, time, racism, purpose, Anthropocene, Unisphere, Wendell Berry, Thomas Pynchon, Frederick Douglass, John Burroughs, Dorothy Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, English Lake District, climate change, Dharug Nura.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Now available in paperback, this is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America's engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon's career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon's relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon's complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.

Pynchon, Thomas --- Criticism and interpretation --- Pinchon, Tomas --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Pynchon, Thomas. --- Literature --- Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General --- Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers --- Against the Day. --- American postmodernity. --- Gravity's Rainbow. --- Mason &Dixon. --- Slow Learner. --- The Crying of Lot 49. --- The Secret Integration Entropy. --- Thomas Pynchon. --- United States' political history. --- Vineland. --- aporia. --- constraint. --- eighteenth-century colonial culture. --- forms of relationship. --- freedom. --- modernism. --- paranoid sensibility.