The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene has three interrelated agendas: (1) It establishes Thomas Pynchon’s three longest novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day – as an ambitious, world-historical trilogy about the emergence and global spread of European modernity and thus presents a groundbreaking new understanding of one of the most important contemporary novelists. (2) On the basis of the analysis of the trilogy’s profound engagement with global history, it presents an elaborate discussion of Pynchon’s historical methods, which refines our understanding of Pynchon as an author of historical fiction and challenges prevalent notions of his relation to literary postmodernism. (3) It charts Pynchon’s early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including their close connection to modernity’s and globalization’s demand for constant growth. In so doing, it constitutes an important corrective to other recent studies of literature and the Anthropocene, showing how literary fiction is not merely a belated reflection of scientific debates about the Anthropocene, but has taken an early and active part in establishing the contours of the current discussions.

Thomas Pynchon is frequently read as an American author who writes American novels about American reality, but this chapter argues that he can fruitfully be considered one of our leading novelists of globalization, and it establishes the considerable benefits – and perhaps even the necessity – of considering his largest novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, one coherent world-historical trilogy about the gestation and global progression of modernity. After positioning this argument in discussions of world literature as well as in the larger field of Pynchon studies, the chapter identifies a number of parallels between the three novels in the trilogy, and it argues that in order to reveal the coherent nature and full scope of Pynchon’s historical project, his three global novels are best read not in their sequence of publication, but in an order that reflects the historical periods they depict. Reading Pynchon’s novels in this order has precedents in the critical work of Samuel Thomas, Sascha Pöhlmann, and Dale Carter, and it paves the ground for the book’s elaborate analysis of the progressive historical narrative in Pynchon’s trilogy.

This chapter explores a range of narrative fiction in Arabic in addition to two novels that hybridize Anglophone Arab literature with Arabic poetic influences. Theoretically anchored in critiques of bio/necropolitics, forced displacement, magical realist environmentalisms, and planetarity, the chapter examines eco-ambiguous visions of desertness in Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust, forest/border thresholds in Hassan Blasim’s “Ali’s Bag,” bio-connective ambivalence in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and Beirut Hellfire Society, and (eco)lienation in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. Stretching from the North African desert to the European forest, from the North American city to contested spaces in the Middle East, the (dis)located works by the diasporic writers addressed here trace the contours of a planetary geoaesthetics that is concerned with borders and their transgression, resistance to immunitary bio/necropower, and reconstructions of comemorative geographies. An Arabic diasporic literary geography hence emerges as an ever-expanding space of encounter for unbounded modes of being, witnessing, telling, and resisting.

This essay argues for the distinctiveness of the call to the planetary in its twenty first century form, without discounting its historical antecedents. It considers nodes of a distinctive necropolitics related increasingly to climate change, which break with the world-now of 1989 and its aftermaths in contemporary theories of world literature. Issues of death and its contemporary modes are worked with, alongside figurations of water and plant life. The essay is cautious yet insistent that we enable a conversation about planetary form as literary form in thinking about world literature.

Drawing on a close reading of the French feminist Des Femmes's documentary Mouvement de libération des femmes Iraniennes année zero made by a group of filmmakers and journalists associated with Antoinette Fouque and the Psych et Po, this chapter articulates the ways that the Iranian Revolution’s anti-disciplinary concept of “the planetary” ( jahani in Persian) situates the object of Iranian studies and the radical mission of the field.

This chapter asks whether the “planetary,” a term that has gained currency in literary criticism since the 1990s, is a manageable framework through which to study modernism. Current iterations of the “planetary” signal crises in our contemporary shared human environment, while also marking a transformation in our disciplines. Addressing this bind, Blanco considers a number of different uses and versions of “planetarity,” from Gayatri Spivak’s and Enrique Dussel’s to Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent provocations within the new modernist studies. While thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of framing a center-less modernism, Blanco also asks what happens when rupture is not thought of as the principal operating principle through which to think modernism. Framing these questions around the experiences of Spanish American modernistas in fin-de-siècle Paris (especially Nicaraguan Rubén Darío and Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo), Blanco ask whether a privileging of a planetary framework effectively undoes a workable conceptualization of modernism.

The question of the prose poem, of Bolaño’s prose poem novels, is the question of literature itself and its synecdochic powers of representation. In his late short story, “Photos,” Bolaño offers a glimpse of a growing recognition, near the end of his life, of the extent to which his literary worlds had remained limited to Europe and the Americas. What remains clear, in an age increasingly dominated by visual media, is that his work speaks passionately against forgetting those who will never be represented, read, made visible. That sustained awareness of the marginal, the neglected, the forgotten, is one he builds into his work at every turn, a core value that merits affirmation and celebration, merits even, perhaps, a certain recognition as exemplary, as representative, as synecdochic, as of a part searching for a greater, more capacious, more inclusive whole. What is called poetry, prose, is not one thing, Bolaño’s work teaches us, but many things, always in process, always becoming historical, its identity not singular but multiple. Situated not between but among genres, discourses, media, his prose poem novels encourage and embrace a paradoxical distinction, a poetics not of opposition but of apposition, a poetics for the twenty-first century.