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"Burroughs's zone, or interzone, is a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world's architectural styles are are fused and all its races and cultures mingle .... Sometimes it is located in Latin America or North Africa, sometimes (as in The Ticket That Exploded, 1962) on another planet, sometimes (as in Cities of the Red Night,, 1981) in a lost civilization of the distant past. By contrast, Alasdair Gray's zone (in Lanark, 1981), a space of paradox modeled on the Wonderland and Looking-glass worlds of the Alice books, has been displaced to the ambiguous no man's land between cities .... Pynchon's zone is paradignmatic for the heterotopian space of postmodernist writing .... Here ... a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space which is associated with occupied Germany, but which is in fact located nowhere but in the written text itself."
--Brian McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction (info)
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