"Only connect!" Delivery Systems in American Fiction - ALA 2022 Chicago
E. M. Forster had something aesthetic in mind with that famous phrase, but it applies as well to more practical or material kinds of systems, networks, and patterns in American fiction, from the whaling industry in Moby-Dick (and the Pequod as metonym for that industry) to the various networks - transportation, financial, criminal, political, logistical, electronic - explored in the work of writers like Frank Norris, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Vollmann, and Jonathan Bayliss.