Chabon mentions Pynchon

[alice wellintown]

Thanks for the reply and for this from Linda Hutcheon:

I happen to think that postmodernism is political, but not in a way
that is of much use, in the long run, to feminisms:   it does
challenge dominant discourses (usually through self-consciousness and
parody),   but it also re-instates those very discourses in the act of
challenging them.   To put it another way,  postmodernism does
deconstruct,  but doesn't really reconstruct.  No feminist is happy
with that kind of potential quietism,  even if she (or he) approves of
the deconstructing impulse:  you simply can't stop there.  This
important issue of agency has become central not only to feminism, of
course, but to "queer theory" and to postcolonial theory.

What constitutes feminist writing, in America, in England, in
English....in languages other than English ...in Commonwealth authors,
and so on...is a contentious issue, even the terms, for example,
"feminist" and "commonwealth" are debated, but what is beyond dispute
are the facts, including the fact that the market for fiction, rich in
narrative innovations and experiements, in everexpanding range of
genres and styles, is, and has been, in authorship and in readership,
in volume, dominated by females, and so one wonders how, despite this,
the academy, the study of of literature, has constructed a tradition,
and this is more the case in the US, I think, of male authors and
their concerns and ignored women writers or made, in their own image,
a handful of Eves? As David S Reynolds has demonstrated, the popular
fiction of the marketplace in America was known to Poe, Hawthorne,
Melville, Cooper, then Twain, Steinbeck, so on, and as his study of
George Lippard's _The Quaker City_ explains, and his major work on
this, _Beneath the American Renaissance_ argues, the cannon was
constructed with the construction of early 19th century constructions
of masculinity and femininity in the working class cultures. The
expansion of the cannon and new historicisms and revisionisms, & Co.,
however,  have not had the impact on the college syllabi, in part
because of the disagreements about deconstruction and reconstruction
and what, as noted, constitutes feminist literature.

Rich, to read widely, as you do, is great advice, but somehow I cannot
accept it as the answer to question about why we should advance one
author over another and this is the reality, and the reality of the
study of literature involves, while an ever-expanding cannon of texts,
still a cannon, a tradition, syllabi written by professors, read by
students. For some time, theory moved authors, like Pynchon and
DeLillo, on to syllabi, moved specific books, like the Handmaiden's
Tale, or The Awakening, on to syllabi. If not theory, then how are we
to construct courses?

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after
1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory.
Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of
The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes
emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its
Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the
stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of
little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct
video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion
or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they
evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really
read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their
inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But
chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can
walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly
amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.

If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and
it has recently become evident that some of its members have been
thinking back on their training. They are doing so, moreover, in a
form older than Theory, a form that Theory has done much to
denaturalize and demystify (OK, “deconstruct”): the more or less
realist novel, which describes individual lives in a fairly linear
manner in conventional, if elegant or well-crafted, prose.

http://nplusonemag.com/the-theory-generation