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SOURCE: Gibson, William, and David L. Ulin. “Present Worries in Future Tense.” Los Angeles Times (4 March 2003): E1.
In the following interview, Gibson discusses Pattern Recognition within the context of American society after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
The last year and a half have been difficult for fiction writers. How, after all, are they to provide, in Lionel Trilling's phrase, a “buzz of implication,” a sense of cultural context, when the entire idea of context is now up in the air?
Last March, at a symposium on post-Sept. 11 literature, one frustrated novelist framed this conundrum explicitly, bemoaning her inability to evoke the textures of daily living in a world where even the most trivial interactions could no longer be assured. How, this writer wondered, was she to re-create the present when the present could now be altered in an instant? How was she to...
This section contains 1,647 words (approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page) |
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