Phantasmagoric 9/11: Blowback and the Limits of Resistance in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) displaces and defamiliarizes the attacks on the World Trade Center and their aftermath, positioning the reader between a pair of funhouse mirrors, one backlit with the specter of 9/11 and the other with an early twentieth-century history of anticapitalist insurgency—with the two reflections bi-locating the reader within their surreal temporal overlap.