Peter Coviello: Vineland Reread

[Mark Kohut]

Once "postmodernists" get you, you are obscure, inhospitable, technically a
cold technician and
a puzzle to be solved. In general.

They were not his early readers, mostly because they were yet to be
created. Electricity had not hit
the frankensteins yet.

On Sat, Jan 2, 2021 at 4:16 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
>