Simon Malpas
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Cultural nostalgia and political possibility in Vineland
in Thomas Pynchon
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In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, and the subsequent prosecution of a War on Terror by the Bush administration, Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland has accrued a renewed sense of significance. Vineland describes how the paranoid sensibility is encouraged and maintained by structures of power that require the identification and persecution of an enemy who is variously defined across the political history of the United States. This chapter explores how paranoia becomes a symptom of a late capitalist culture attempting to maintain its coherence in the face of perceived real or imagined threats to its integrity. Any discussion of political paranoia needs to acknowledge Richard Hofstadter's classic enumeration of the 'paranoid style', which, he proposes, assumes 'the existence of a vast insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character'.

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