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    After the counterculture: American capitalism, power, and opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

    Flay, Catherine (2017) After the counterculture: American capitalism, power, and opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Journal of American Studies 51 (3), pp. 779-804. ISSN 0021-8758.

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    Abstract

    Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 29 Mar 2017 14:06
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:41
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/18500

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