MLA 2014: Pynchon at the Bleeding Edge

[Dave Monroe]

A second piece of good MLA news for the day: I’ll also be
participating on a roundtable on the new Thomas Pynchon novel,
Bleeding Edge, scheduled to be published this fall.  Also on the panel
are our organizer Cornelius Collins, Samuel Cohen, David Cowart, Amy
Elias, Jeffrey Severs, and Alison Shonkwiler. We’ll be a large and
diverse group, and I’m excited to get together with both old friends
and new collaborators to see what we as a group can do with what is
sure to be an exciting novel and publishing event — the roundtable
model of brief comments and broad conversation should give us a lot of
room for rich engagement.

My own contributions to the panel are best prefigured by the paragraph
on media and technology in the abstract below — inspired by the
multi-leveled historical questions of the novel and the other
speakers, and by Mark Sample’s imaginary DH history of Don DeLillo,
I’m thinking about how the online runup to the novel might speak to
whatever Pynchon has to say about the culture and economy of
technology in the early 21st century — but who knows what the novel
itself might actually hold…

http://paulbenzon.com/mla-2014pynchon/