Peter Coviello: Vineland Reread

[Charles Albert]

*Departing fromvisions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and
obscure, hediscloses an author far more companionable and humane. *


I don't know why this is a revelation. Were Pynchon just a technician, he
would have been a 2 or 3 hit wonder.


But I appreciate all efforts to labor it.


love,

cfa

On Sat, Jan 2, 2021, 11:59 AM <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:

> Happy New Year!
>
>
>
> Anyone seen this one? Publication month January 2021.  Ordering for Europe
> is through John Wiley so it will take ages before it arrives as they don't
> have it on stock today.
>
>
>
> http://cup.columbia.edu/book/vineland-reread/9780231185219
>
>
>
> Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking
> Pynchon's
> return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity's
> Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity.
> However,
> for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of
> thinking about Pynchon's writing and about how we read and how we live in
> the rough currents of history.
>
> Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads
> Pynchon's offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite
> summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work
> of
> heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of
> failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving
> meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the
> fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police,
> Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of
> late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing
> from
> visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he
> discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon's
> harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a
> model for thinking through our catastrophic present.
>
>
>
> Michel.
>
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>