Paper Empire
William Gaddis and the World System

Joseph Tabbi (Edited by), Rone Shavers (Edited by)

9780817354060, The University of Alabama Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 February 2007

328 pages, 14 illustrations
22.5 x 20 x 1.9 cm, 0.489 kg

Paper Empire fills the gap in the scholarly literature on Gaddis. I know of no other monograph or collection of essays that addresses in such a focused way the contexts, especially the systematic contexts, of Gaddis's writing. - Brian McHale, author of The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems

In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis' collected nonfiction, his final novel, and Jonathan Franzen's lengthy attack on him in ""The New Yorker"", a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis' legacy. In a review in ""The London Review of Books"", critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis' reputation: Gaddis' unique hybridity, his ability to ""write in the gap between two dispensations,"" between science and literature, theory and narrative, and ""different orders of linguistic imagination."" Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels - ""The Recognitions"", ""JR"", ""Carpenter's Gothic"", and ""A Frolic of His Own"" - are notable in the ways that they often restrict themselves to the language and communication systems of the worlds he portrays. Issues of corporate finance, the American legal system, economics, simulation and authenticity, bureaucracy, transportation, and mass communication permeate his narratives in subject, setting, and method. The essays address subjects as diverse as cybernetics, the law, media theory, race and class, music, and the perils and benefits of globalization. The collection also contains an unpublished interview with Gaddis from just after the publication of ""JR"" and an essay on the Gaddis archive, newly opened at Washington University in St. Louis.