MLR, ., West show, and other amusements to be gaped at. Pynchon’s adventure-hero aeronauts , the Chums of Chance, visit the fair, as do Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Merle Rideout, Lew Basnight, and several other characters. e focus on cities, Mogultay argues, spreads out from the Exposition, and in many we find variations on themes first offered here. e Archduke goes slumming in the Black region of Chicago, and that desire to view enclaves touristically is repeated in other cities, particularly in Venice and New York. e city is theorized as spectacle, and as something to be arranged in the viewer’s memory as an adventure. e city is also studied in terms of its governance and planning. Some of Pynchon’s work, as Mogultay shows, sets up the city as the new frontier, and Pynchon makes use of popular frontier novel tropes both in themselves and as they morphed into detective plots, first about the Pinkerton men, then in London with the Sherlock Holmes style of operator, and then as the focal figure of hard-boiled noir fiction. All three phases of detection are undertaken by Lew Basnight in his quest to understand himself morally. He must in the end admit his own complicity, and we as readers are expected to do the same. We can be grateful to Mogultay for what he illuminates, but at times the rarefied issues curdle the flow of his usually readable style: In Pynchon’s novel, the city as dream experience thus emerges facilitated by technological developments and based on rationalist principles. riving on the pervasive logic of the spectacle, this dreamworld can be said to foster the atomization of long experience. Moreover, as a corollary of the intellectual strain to make sense of the urban experience, an increasing forgetfulness seems to take hold. Pynchon indeed provides a quite Benjaminian rendering of urban modernity here, which can, accordingly, be construed as mirroring the aesthetics of postmodern urbanism. (pp. –) Spectacle is a crucial focus throughout the book, so at times cities are theoretically framed in ways their inhabitants would neither recognize nor understand. e last chapter, ‘e Doleful City’, explores Pynchon’s fantasized version of the / attack on the World Trade Center. Pynchon emphasizes the immediate impulse to memorialize a site rather than to treat it as a lived-in environment. roughout, Mogultay studies Pynchon’s extraction of the roots of the postmodern city from the modern, and shows how restructuring is ‘geared toward the fabrication of place images’ (p. ). Pynchon shows sign value ultimately overriding and replacing the use value of a city. P S U K H e Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage. By R C. New York: Oxford University Press. . iv+ pp. $;£.. ISBN ––––. Robert Chodat’s book makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing revaluation of important figures and trends within post-Second World War American literature and philosophy outside of the postmodern and poststructuralist canon. e Reviews ‘postwar sages’ the book explores—Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison , Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace—push back against what Chodat identifies as a nominalist disdain for ‘wooly, discomfiting, abstract normative concepts ’ dominant within scientific, aesthetic, and other intellectual circles (p. ). His subjects emerge from a ‘pragmatist-Wittgensteinian tradition’ where meaningful terms gain legitimacy from their social legibility rather than their Platonic foundations (p. ); thinkers within this legacy argue for the significance of moral terms such as ‘courage, fraternity, marriage, [or] fallibility’ while understanding that their definitions are contextual and contingent (p. ). Reading his subjects’ non-fiction allows Chodat to trace the social and political debates that matter to them. Robinson, for example, inveighs against mechanistic applications of Darwinism to human behaviour, while Ellison scorns the social scientific emphasis on black identity’s disempowerment; Wallace’s essays reflect the neo-Aristotelian emphasis on public and communal norms in s–s philosophy (which Chodat ably summarizes). In the case of nearly all the authors he examines, however, the move between essayistic non-fiction and memoir or narrative fiction does not allow for simple transfer of arguments. Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins () paradoxically seems to contradict the rigorous anti...
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Jun 15, 2023
Enes Yalçin 
Open Access
