Book contents
- Counterfeit Culture
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Counterfeit Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: America and the ‘Way to the Devil’
- Chapter 1 Marguerite Young’s Flood of Consciousness
- Chapter 2 William Gaddis and the ‘Novel-Writing-Machine’ of Andy Warhol
- Chapter 3 ‘Paper Reality’: William S. Burroughs and the Cut-Up Method
- Chapter 4 ‘Bad History’: Thomas Pynchon and the Apocryphal Epic
- Chapter 5 ‘History Shambles On’: William T. Vollmann and the Seven Dreams Cycle
- Conclusion: ‘Every Story Has Two Tails’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Recent books in this series (continued from page ii)
Conclusion: ‘Every Story Has Two Tails’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2019
- Counterfeit Culture
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
- Counterfeit Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: America and the ‘Way to the Devil’
- Chapter 1 Marguerite Young’s Flood of Consciousness
- Chapter 2 William Gaddis and the ‘Novel-Writing-Machine’ of Andy Warhol
- Chapter 3 ‘Paper Reality’: William S. Burroughs and the Cut-Up Method
- Chapter 4 ‘Bad History’: Thomas Pynchon and the Apocryphal Epic
- Chapter 5 ‘History Shambles On’: William T. Vollmann and the Seven Dreams Cycle
- Conclusion: ‘Every Story Has Two Tails’
- Bibliography
- Index
- Recent books in this series (continued from page ii)
Summary
Of the seven volumes of Vollmann’s historical epic, only The Rifles would be able to find a guaranteed home in this canon of ‘new rebels’, with the remaining Dreams falling into an outmoded historical category, along with the experimental prose epics of Melville, Young, Gaddis, Burroughs and Pynchon. Significantly, Wallace himself was attracted to Trilling’s conservative focus on individual class and heroism (unlike the other writers discussed in this book), scrawling in pencil on the flyleaf of his copy of Frank’s Dostoyevsky biography a brief note: ‘Sincerity & Authenticity / or ‘Authenticity & Sincerity’ / Lionel Trilling’. For Wallace, the ‘really striking, inspiring thing’ about the Russian was not his formal turn towards structural polyphony as such, but simply that ‘he was brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Counterfeit CultureTruth and Authenticity in the American Prose Epic since 1960, pp. 187 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019