VLVL feminism

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> Terrance:
> > Kinda interesting that the more recent dissertations on VL take this
> > position. Pynchon is not being compared with Melville or Gaddis or Roth
> > or Nabokov or even with Delillo, but with Toni Morrison & Co.
> >
> > The texts are often ignored to make these silly readings fit together.
> > VL isn't a feminist novel by any stretch.
> 
> I think feminist readings of _Vineland_ have been around for a long time,
> and they have a precedent in some of those much earlier feminist responses
> to _Lot 49_. 

Quite right, I was referring to a more recent trend in the dissertations
I've been reading. 



Granted that sometimes the feminist spin is offered or
> regurgitated to try and compensate for the fact that Pynchon's novels, and
> _Vineland_ particularly so, don't conform to a particular reader's
> particular political expectations. 

Speaking of polemical reading of VL, nothing beats DAVID THOREEN's 
THE PRESIDENT'S EMERGENCY WAR POWERS AND THE EROSION OF CIVIL LIBERTIES
IN PYNCHON'S
VINELAND 

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm


Of course, true feminist and Marxist
> criticism is fundamentally politically engaged, so reading selectively, or
> against the text, or discarding it altogether, are envisaged as legitimate
> approaches to the job of criticism (i.e. reading). 

Generally I prefer Marxist criticism to Feminist criticism. 


Often it's not just
> silliness or hot air but a quite deliberate politico-rhetorical act, and
> interesting in and of itself.

Of course it is. Bloody good too, some of it. 


> 
> The starting point for many of the feminist readings of _VL_ is Sister
> Rochelle's 'Lilith' stories, but I think it's extremely difficult to argue
> that she, or her stories, are being presented unironically in the text.

Right. 


> 
> I'm not sure about the '50s "masculine" vs '60s "feminized" dichotomy, or
> where you've situated Pynchon therein, but there's probably a case to be
> made for _Vineland_ occupying, in parts, a sort of bridge between _On the
> Road_ and, say, _Thelma and Louise_ [1991].


I'd situate P On the Road, in the Cuckoo's Next.