Re. Pynchon and babies

[Vaska Andjelkovic]

>I was wondering if anyone could recommend any studies of 
>race/gender representations within Pynchon to me.  It'd be greatly 
>appreciated.

>I'm fairly certain I'm about to get flamed to death for this,

>Matt


[1]  Not by me, Matt.  I remember Tom Adamowski, whom you probably know
given your U of T address, musing once in a conversation we had about
Pynchon how unrelievedly adulatory Pynchon criticism was.  And, most of it
*has* been hagiography in a lit-crit mode.  I've always found something
troublesome about Pynchon's treatment -- and the use he makes of -- his
female characters.  And after his intro to _Slow Learner_ I was disappointed
-- to put it mildly -- with some of the stuff in _Vineland_.  The novel's
attribution of some sort of crypto-fascism or at least crypto-militarism to
a generalized (essentialized) female mind (I can't find the exact page
reference right now) is one of the things about the novel that continue to
bother me.    


[2]  I haven't kept up with the Pynchon lit-crit industry and don't know of
any full-length studies about P's treatment of race and gender.  But the
lack of any critical engagement with these issues on the part of the
lit-crit community interested in Pynchon's work was notorious up until only
a few years ago.  Perhaps things have changed in the meanwhile.  

You might want to have a look at a couple of articles that have appeared in
_Postmodern Culture_, though.  They are online and can be found at

http://jefferson.village.edu/pmc/issue.596/chapman.596.html
and
http://jefferson.village.edu/pmc/issue.595/berger.595.html


Vaska
vaska at geocities.com