The Ruins of Urban Modernity by Utku Mogultay

Author:Utku Mogultay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Just like Turner’s frontier, then, the notion of the urban frontier glosses over the systemic underpinnings of processes of geographical and economic development by idealizing the actions of individual pioneers.

This chapter turns to the negotiation of the frontier myth in Against the Day—a novel which revealingly begins its narrative itinerary with the deceptive complacency of the White City and from where it sets out on an exploration of a crisis-shaken urban-industrial society that increasingly falls under the spell of the frontier myth. In doing so, Pynchon’s novel enacts a literary mapping of late nineteenth and early twentieth century geographical and economic development in the American West. To this end, Pynchon shows a keen eye for historical detail, especially when it comes to the history of labor relations, the conflict between capital and labor and its entanglements with state policy. Building on these historical contexts, Against the Day develops a narrative outlook that undermines the rigid dichotomy between country and city that the frontier myth relies on and, instead, underscores the complex interdependence of both realms. Further, by augmenting its perspective with a number of invented scenarios and anachronisms, the novel also points beyond the history of the American West and comments on the continuity of the frontier myth in the twentieth century, especially in relation to urban discourses.

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