Peter Coviello: Vineland Reread

[David Morris]

VL was a sexist-political-comedic pamphlet.  I’ve read it three times, and
disliked it more each time.  I especially hated its ending.  I hate it when
Pynchon shows his sexism.

David Morris

On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 3:16 PM Charles Albert <cfalbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> *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
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>