Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[alice wellintown]

Lacey did his homework. I don't know what you are saying here about
political theorists.



On Tuesday, January 29, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Yea, he really should have done his homework.  A lot hinges on the word
> serious. I think every writer who is not a pure propagandist or jokester is
> serious, and  even a fair percentage of jokesters, but who exactly
> qualifies as a "political theorist"?
> On Jan 29, 2013, at 7:21 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> >>> 1) I didn't get the impression that Lacey was saying he was the first
> to
> >>> look at Pynchon politics, only that the bulk of criticism is literary,
> and
> >>> some  political writing was, according to him, over-concerned with
> >>> conspiracy/paranoia.  A bit too nit-picky to interest me, though I
>  agree
> >>> that there are other political Pynchon essays.
> >
> > There are dozens of essays, journals, articles, and several full
> > length studies, dissertations, and books dedicated to Pynchon's
> > politics. There is, as mentioned, a Law Journal that takes up Pynchon
> > and the Law.  Lacey states:
> > Scholarship on Pynchon’s work has grown into a cottage industry,
> > especially in literary studies. But, up to this point, Pynchon has
> > failed to attract any serious attention from political theorists, even
> > though he is arguably the most important novelist writing in English
> > today about the organization of power in the postmodern world.  On the
> > one hand, the unwillingness of political theorists to tackle Pynchon
> > is understandable.
> >
> >
> > This is how he begins. Again, claiming that one's article or essay or
> > book is fresh and original, opens new avenues, explores ignored
> > terrain,  is a fairly common way to proceed. But here the claim is
> > made not five years after publication, or ten, or even twenty, but 30
> > plus years.  Moreover, the claim is made after the cottage industry
> > had Vineland and M&D, SL Introduction, and several other essays that
> > expose the Political Pynchon, then two more novels. After VL the
> > cottage industry exploded with political readings. And, of course,
> > there were those who maintained that Pynchon was writing political
> > sature from the start.
> >
> > So, again, not a key point, but there it is. One wonders how Lacey
> > managed to miss all those other studeis of Pynchon's politics.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130130/a131da4a/attachment.html>