Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon’s Global Novels

Taking Horace Engdahl’s critique of the insularity of American literature as its starting point, the essay goes on to discuss Richard Gray’s and Michael Rothberg’s recent articles in American Literary History, both of which call for a literature capable of addressing the contemporary global reality. While both Gray and Rothberg claim that such a literature has yet to be written, the essay argues that Thomas Pynchon’s three novels Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day can profitably be read together as an ambitiously conceived world-historical trilogy which tells the story of the gestation and emergence of our contemporary global reality.