Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow (1973-) [EN, IT, HU]

A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery launch Slothrop on a wildly comic extravaganza.

“Gravity’s Rainbow is Pynchon’s most celebrated novel. An intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work, including preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy, the novel has spawned a wealth of commentary and critical material, including reader’s guides, books and scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions, and art works. Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel, and it has similarly been described as ‘literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices’.” (from Wikipedia)

A Journey Into the Mind of P, documentary on Pynchon (dir. Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini, 2002, 88 min)

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Gravity’s Rainbow (English, 2000, EPUB)
Gravity’s Rainbow (English, undated, PDF, unpaginated)
L’arcobaleno della gravità (Italian, trans. Giuseppe Natale, 1999, no OCR, 82 MB), (OCR’d, unpaginated)
Súlyszivárvány (Hungarian, trans. János Széky, 2009, unpaginated)

Dana Diminescu (ed.): Social Science Information journal, Special issue: Diasporas on the Web (2012)

“One of the major changes affecting diasporas the world over since the 1980s has been the increasing number of communities scattered throughout physical space, along with new forms of presence, regrouping, interaction and mobilization within digital territories.

This change calls for a renewal in epistemological approaches. The topics under study, as well as the conceptual and methodological tools used to analyse them, need to be reconsidered in the face of this evolution of diasporas. The articles published in this issue of SSI1 bear witness to such an effort: researchers and engineers involved in the e-Diasporas Atlas project have sought to find the most appropriate concepts, tools and methods to explore the Web of diasporas, based on a number of case studies. This work represents a vast new area of investigation, which is still under way.

In this introduction, we examine the different conceptual tools used during the research, analyse their relevance for the different diasporic communities on the Web and present the methodological chain developed within the e-Diasporas Atlas project as well as the most important findings.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Dana Diminescu, Anat Ben-David, Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, Houda Asal, Marta Severo and Eleonora Zuolo, Teresa Graziano, Ingrid Therwath, Priya Kumar, Tristan Bruslé, Kristina Balalovska, Francesco Mazzucchelli

Social Science Information, December 2012; 51 (4)
Publisher: SAGE, on behalf of Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris
ISSN 0539-0184
245 pages
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e-Diasporas Atlas project page (includes working papers and interactive graph)

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Michael Taussig: Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993)

In his most ambitious and accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig undertakes a history of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and its relation to alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. Drawing upon such diverse sources as theories of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer, research on the Cuna Indians, and theories of colonialism and postcolonialism, Taussig shows that the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism, and more specifically, to the colonial trade’s construction of “savages.” With analysis that is vigorous, unorthodox, and often breathtaking, Taussig’s cross-cultural discussion of mimesis deepens our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.

Publisher Routledge, New York/London, 1993
ISBN 0415906873, 9780415906876
320 pages

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