The Implicated Neoliberal Subject in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21341516 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ivan Stacy (0000-0002-9812-4196, Beijing Normal University), Arin Keeble (0000-0001-6072-8800, Edinburgh Napier University) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 320-347 |
| Publication date | 2022-05-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8758 • E-ISSN: 1469-5154 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s002187582100058x |
| OpenAlex | W4205587538 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
This article argues that in Bleeding Edge , Pynchon moves from an oppositional schema in which the world is divided into “elect” and “preterite” populations towards one that is concerned with implication and complicity. The article uses Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject (2019) as the basis for analysis, and notably his argument that to be implicated in wrongdoing often involves a kind of structural blindness towards suffering elsewhere. In the case of Bleeding Edge , the protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, is implicated in the violence committed in order to secure the hegemony of neoliberalism. The article describes Maxine's gradual recognition of her own blindness, and hence of her implication in the harms perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism. It begins by noting that her experience of neoliberalism is one of process and of immaterial exchange. The second part of the article argues that the introduction of Nicholas Windust shows how neoliberalism may be an experience of rupture or trauma for those outside the developed world. Finally, with the 9/11 attacks on New York, the same violence rebounds against its source; the attacks therefore act as the final stage in Maxine's increasing awareness of her own implication
Argument (complex analysis) · Complicity · Hegemony · Neoliberalism (international relations) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Wrongdoing · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Medicine · Postmodernism in Literature and Education
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Globalists
After Katrina
On Complicity and Compromise
Neither Literally nor as Metaphor
Constructing Postmodernism
On the Pacific Edge of Catastrophe, or Redemption
This land is my land, this land also is my land
More metaphysician than politician
Economies of greed in 'late Pynchon
| Highly cited | No |
|---|