California Countercultures: Pynchon’s Paranoid California with Michael Cohen

[Bruno]

California Countercultures: Pynchon’s Paranoid California with Michael Cohen
<http://bampfa.org/event/california-countercultures-pynchon%E2%80%99s-paranoid-california-michael-cohen>

Lecture | March 1 | 12 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
<http://www.berkeley.edu/map?bampfa>

Sponsor: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
<http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/>

In 1964, Thomas Pynchon applied for graduate study in the math department
at UC Berkeley. Fortunately for world literature, Berkeley rejected
Pynchon, who went on to write several of the greatest works of postwar
American literature, including The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s
Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), and Inherent Vice (2009). Though he was
rejected by Cal, the Long Island–born Pynchon stayed on the Pacific coast,
wandering between Berkeley, the beach towns south of LA, scattered writing
retreats in Mexico, a job doing technical writing in a Boeing missile plant
in Seattle, and the northern pot farms of the Emerald Triangle, all the
while obsessively avoiding any semblance of the enormous literary celebrity
that his writing earned him. In that time, his extraordinary prose style
and labyrinthine literary form came to embody, like no other novelist’s,
the history, spirit, and radical challenge of the California
counterculture. This lecture presents a reading of Pynchon’s The Crying of
Lot 49 as an act of mapping the emergent and overlapping paranoid
subcultures of a conservative state about to explode into open cultural
revolt.

Michael Cohen, associate teaching professor in the African American studies
department at UC Berkeley, is interested in the cultural and political
history of the United States from the Civil War to the present. His
research interests focus on the history of racial formations, class
conflicts, and popular radical social movements between the 1870s and 1930s.


* Event is included with admission

Tickets: Free for BAMPFA members, UC Berkeley students, faculty, staff,
retirees; 18 & under + guardian | $10 Non-UC Berkeley students, 65+,
disabled persons | $12 General admission | Event is included with admission

Event contact: 510-6420808
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