Gravity&39s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom [Paperback]

Luc Herman (Author)
LUC HERMAN is a professor of English and narrative theory at the University of Antwerp. He is the coauthor of Handbook of Narrative Analysis with Bart Vervaeck and the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon with Inger Dalsgaard and Brian McHale.

Steven Weisenburger (Author)
STEVEN WEISENBURGER is Mossiker Chair in Humanities and chair of the English Department at Southern Methodist University. His books include Fables of Subversion (Georgia) and Modern Medea.

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.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchon’s novel in long sixties history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novel’s abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation, and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the text’s close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practices—free-speech resistance played out lÃ-