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After the Counterculture: American Capitalism, Power, and Opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2016

CATHERINE FLAY
CATHERINE FLAY*
Affiliation:
English and Humanities Department, Birkbeck College, University of London. Email: catherine.flay@cantab.net.
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 779 - 804
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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