Paper Empire : William Gaddis and the World System

In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis' collected nonfiction, his final novel, and Jonathan Franzen's lengthy attack on him in The New Yorker, a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis' legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis' reputation: Gaddis' unique hybridity, his ability to write in the gap between two dispensations, between science and literature, theory and narrative, and different orders of linguistic imagination. Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels - The Recognitions, JR, Carpenter's Gothic, and A Frolic of His Own - are notable in the ways that they often restrict themselves to the language and communication systems of the worlds he portrays.