The gender of future Pynchon Studies

[Vaska]

In the interest of brevity, I'll be cutting off most of Eric's post on this
topic although I can't think of a single ill-conceived sentence in the whole
of it.  I make this observation in earnest because it is very rare to come
across such well thought-out comments on the scarsity and the reasons
thereof of women scholars in the field of Pynchon studies.

>The time of Pynchon's writing has been the time of women's growing, 
>yet elusive, empowerment. Yet  his scholarly readership is still, too largely,
>male. What can be done to try to encourage a greater range of female 
>scholarship in the field of Pynchon Studies? 
>
>     This is a real question, and I can not answer it myself. I would 
>like to hear what other people think. 

I don't know what the actual format of PIP seminars will turn out to be.
But it might help things somewhat to devote 4-5 sessions to either [1]
feminist approaches to Pynchon's work; or [2] the representation and
function of female characters in Pynchon's novels.  This may, to begin with,
attract more women to the seminars: especially if it is made quite clear
that critical views on Pynchon's work are genuinely welcome.

Pynchon scholarship has been, for the most part, quite adulatory -- and for
many good reasons.  The chief of them is that Pynchon is one of the perhaps
5 absolutely outstanding novelists of this century working in the English
language.  To acknowledge, let alone plumb the depths of that achievement
had to result in a body of scholarship that some have called "hagiographic."   

The almost uniformly high praise Pynchon's work has attracted so far does,
however, tend to scare off those who would like to engage with it in a more
critical manner.  What Eric has written about tenure and its role in
securing intellectual freedom of enquiry bears repeating: early on in my
doctoral studies, for example, I was taken aside by a 17-th century woman
scholar of some repute who warned me, in all good faith, to keep some of the
stuff I was already working on well under wraps -- and not to dream of
publishing it until I have the protective shield of a tenured position well
in place [I still don't].  This woman was/is no coward: and I'm sure that
Eric and other .edu people on this list have either heard similar stories or
been participants in some themselves.  So, until and unless it's made
perfectly clear that it's OK, genuinely OK, to submit Pynchon's work to
*every* kind of scrutiny, I fear that not only female but also some male
scholars will shy off from the sort of work they'd otherwise dearly love to do.

Pynchon's reputation will not go down in flames as a result of opening his
work to women scholars: there are many mutually conflicting feminist
approaches and views, so I expect that when this sort of opening-up does
finally take place, we shall see a whole array of new [and I hope inspiring]
insights about Pynchon.

A last suggestion: it may perhaps work even better, in terms of the PIP
seminar series, as well as whatever future and planned Pynchon conferences
there are, to let both [1] and [2] above be subsumed under a more general
rubric: maybe that of the cultural politics of Pynchon's work.  This would
have the advantage of rescuing such issues and interests from a certain kind
of academic ghettoization, i.e. from being dismissed as "women's issues."  

Vaska