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Chapter 20 - Real Estate and the Internet

from Part II - Culture, Politics, and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2019

Inger H. Dalsgaard
Affiliation:
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
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Summary

A famous image from The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) – in which Oedipa Maas compares the concealed communication of a suburban “sprawl of houses” to that of a “printed circuit” board (CL 24) – sets the tone for Thomas Pynchon’s writing on real estate as much as on computing. Both these fields have grown during Pynchon’s writing career; both have come to represent systems of control throughout his writing. In his latest novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), real estate and urban planning along with the integration of computing into personal and relational spaces reappear, two twenty-first-century digital natives (sons of the female protagonist Maxine Tarnow) merging the fields at a deeper level than Oedipa’s superficial pattern recognition had done. In Pynchon’s latest analysis of human agency, both urban planning and IT infrastructure remain central; they become either loci of control, contested spaces, or places of resistance, depending on who builds, buys, uses, or reclaims the city – be it real or virtual.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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