Gravity's Rainbow, domination, and freedom

Description

"What's free?" (an introduction) -- Fromm and the neo-Freudian library -- Marcuse: (no) chances for freedom in advanced industrial society -- Brown's polymorphous perversity and Marcuse's repressive tolerance -- Total assault on the culture -- The law and the liberation of fantasy -- Controlling Slothrop -- War as a cartel project -- Working for the Nazis -- The logic of the camp -- Liberating narration -- Narrating liberation -- Tyrone Slothrop's "fuck you!" -- "Too late" (a conclusion).;"When published in 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon’s extensive references to modern science, history, and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practices taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book’s great theme is domination: humanity’s diminished “chances for freedom” in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket."--Publisher description. "What's free?" (an introduction) -- Fromm and the neo-Freudian library -- Marcuse: (no) chances for freedom in advanced industrial society -- Brown's polymorphous perversity and Marcuse's repressive tolerance -- Total assault on the culture -- The law and the liberation of fantasy -- Controlling Slothrop -- War as a cartel project -- Working for the Nazis -- The logic of the camp -- Liberating narration -- Narrating liberation -- Tyrone Slothrop's "fuck you!" -- "Too late" (a conclusion).