AtD / TRP / feminist type stuff

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

I wholly agree with you on Molly Hite, but not on Dana Medoro.
But as I feel [in more ways than one] disqualified to speak for
Dana, please let me quote Bruno Arich-Gerz's review of "Blissful
Bewilderment" - a Nordic collection of Pynchon essays - for the
"Studies in the Novel" (Winter 2003, Vol. 35, Issue 4):

[...]
At least five of them deal with what Mark Troy's article on Mason
& Dixon calls (and David Dickson in his essay on Vineland echoes
as) "possibilities for conceptual liberation" (207,182). Troy and
Dickson, but also Robert Holton (on the short stories in the Slow
Learner collection), Tiina Kakela-Puumala (on V.) and Dana Medoro
(on The Crying of Lot 49) look for the "alternative route" (Medoro
62), for the tertium datur that outsmarts the conventional set of
oppositions (e.g., as in Kakela-Puumala's essay, animate/inanimate and
accepted/unacceptable respectively) and their alleged generalizability.
Liberation seems possible in the interstices of these dichotomies.
V.'s inanimateness thus becomes, "paradoxically, the only way to
resist interpretation, labeling, and the reader's control over her.
When she can no longer be conceived as human, she can retain her
integrity and her secret" (25). Or "menstruation emerges," in Lot
49, "as a code" that allows for "possibilities of [...] revelations"
beyond "the tower/void opposition and the male/mail system" (62).
Especially these two critics, Kakela-Puumala and Medoro, produce
most inspiring and convincing close readings. The first casts a
truly new light on the "ways in which Pynchon both affirms and
questions the dehumanization theme" (18) by criticizing "the
negativity or non-value of anything non-human" (16). The second,
Medoro, brilliantly traces how Pynchon raises the issues of
melancholy and - as a sequel to her 1999 article on V. in Pynchon
Notes - menstruation: "Oedipa Maas's quest gives rise to a theory
of menstruation as an experience involving both melancholic wisdom
and the self's relationship to the sacred" (57).
[...]

Pdf available for those interested.


Happy New Year of Pig to all of you!


Heikki


On Sat, 30 Dec 2006, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:
> There are some awful feminist readings of Pynchon to be sure - Dana Medoro's
> analysis of "the menstrual economy" of Pynchon's work comes to mind - but
> there are also a couple of good ones. See for instance Molly Hite's
> "Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland" in the anthology "The
> Vineland Papers."
>
> Best,
>
> Tore
>
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