For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of capitalism point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon's novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, this book analyzes this transformation in relation not only to Pynchon's work but also to its literary, and cultural context.

""Lines of Flight" is an impressive achievement, reminiscent of the work of Fredric Jameson in its engagement with social and political issues, its sensitivity to questions of the ideology of form, and the authority with which it parses complex problems of textuality and discourse and identifies their cultural significance. Pynchon has not had so sympathetic a reader."--Hayden White, Stanford University