The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

(Hardback)

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The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere.

Reviews

The Ruins of Urban Modernity rises to the challenge presented by Pynchons spatial imaginary, making a brilliant case for reading Against the Day as an urban novel offering vital insights into the contradictory geographies of modernity. * Hsuan L. Hsu, Professor of English, University of California, Davis, USA *
In the vast Pynchon scholarship, the city has remained an underrepresented subject. The Ruins of Urban Modernity gives Pynchons treatment of urban spatiality the attention it deserves in a thorough book-length study of Against the Day. Utku Mogultay shows how in Pynchons prose, a distinct ruin aesthetic gestures simultaneously toward complex layers of urban memory and toward unwritten future citiesincluding the ones we live in today. * Lieven Ameel, Senior Research Fellow, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, Finland, and President of the Association for Literary Urban Studies *
Utku Mogultay is a very learned critic who persuades us that Pynchons Against the Day is not just zany and deliberately obscure. * Modern Language Review *
Mogultays book offers substantial insights into the underrepresented subject of urban setting in Pynchon scholarship and promises further investigation into Pynchons urban imagination in terms of city structure. * Orbit *

Author Bio

Utku Mogultay is an independent scholar based in Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.