JR and the Flux of Capital

In accordance with America's ? mythological? geography, Leslie Fiedler tells us in The Return of the Vanishing American, Ameri can novelists write four kinds of books : Northerns, Southerns, Easterns and Westerns, although only the last is customarily acknowledged as a distinct type Within Fiedler's typology, Wil liam Gaddis's first novel, The Recognitions, published in 1955, easily qualifies as an Easterner, or ?East coast book?, which treats the return of an American to Europe and the Old World as a return to ? origins ? and the ? old self? or ? original Adam whom the New World presumably made a New Man ?. In so doing, the ? East coast novel? typically searches for a peculiarly American code as well as a recoding with Europe, often through the agency of art. In this perspective, however, The Recognitions manifests a strong ambivalence, for while it obviously turns back to European antecedents on many levels, including that of the plot, it also demonstrates that no such recoding is possible, at least in literary and mythic terms, and that attempts at such recoding only lead to death and dispersion

Ancient history · Capital (architecture · Economics · Flux (metallurgy · History · Materials Science · Themes in Literature Analysis

• William Gaddis'sJ Rand the Many Faces of Junk Bonds

  Mikkel Krause Frantzen•differences•2020

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