William Gaddis, Agape, Agape

Peter Dempsey (University of Sunderland)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1998

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novella

Resources

Agape, Agape (2002) is a posthumously-published novella on the theme of mechanization in the arts, a subject dear to Gaddis's heart and about which he collected data his whole life. He originally planned a non-fiction study but when he discovered how seriously ill he was, he wrote the piece as fiction. The novella is a tirade about the debasement of culture by a nameless and very ill narrator who is surrounded by a product of a lifetime's research into the topic. His skin is paper-thin by the drugs he must take, just as his room is piled high with the papers that make up his research; papers that will never be collated and turned into a finished piece of work. Beckett-like, the narrator carries on his work in the face of death, …

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186 words

Citation: Dempsey, Peter. "Agape, Agape". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 December 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10821, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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