Fwd: CFP for International Pynchon Week 2024 [since this _used to be_ a Pynchon list]

[Krafft, John M.]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sergej Macura <gargantua_xp at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2023 12:35:37 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: International Pynchon Week 2024 - First Call for Papers

    Dear colleagues,

    The English Department at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, is
pleased to inform you that the next conference in Pynchon studies will
take place in Belgrade, from June 17 to 21, 2024. We hope that the
invitation finds you early enough, and that you will disseminate this
call to other Pynchon scholars who may not be on the mailing list.

    We will be happy to offer answers to all the possible logistical
questions related to the pre-conference period, and certainly those
directly concerned with the conference when it duly approaches.

    Yours sincerely,

    Sergej Macura
    Aleksandra Vukotić

---

INTERNATIONAL PYNCHON WEEK 2024 IN BELGRADE

June 17–21, 2024

University of Belgrade, Serbia

CALL FOR PAPERS



The literary and cultural phenomenon known as Thomas Pynchon is an
enduring demonstration of multiple facets of the contemporary age –
despite his notorious reclusiveness in a time when popularity is
indiscriminately produced and also self-produced, he decided to
withdraw from public view and construct his imaginary world without
the ephemeral aid of media advertising and promotion. This consistent
strategy has perhaps motivated the readers and critics over the past
half-century to delve more deeply into the inexhaustible logical,
structural and ideological possibilities which his works offer, with
different research paradigms appearing as the decades went by. The
first dedicated outlet for Pynchon scholarship was the journal Pynchon
Notes, in publication from 1979 to 2009, succedeed in 2012 by Orbit:
Writing Around Pynchon, which altered its title to Orbit: A Journal of
American Literature and became more inclusive towards other postmodern
authors in Pynchon’s frame of reference. The more immediate vehicle
for the exchange of ideas, however, appeared with the first
International Pynchon Week in Warwick in 1994, followed by conferences
in Antwerp, London, Cologne, Valletta, Granada, Munich, Lublin,
Durham, Athens, La Rochelle, Rome and Vancouver. One might say that it
is a unique privilege to study a living author with such a lively
academic network and long-running conference history.

The English Department at the Faculty of Philology of the University
of Belgrade, Serbia, is pleased to announce that the 14th
International Pynchon Week will take place on its premises from June
17 to June 21, 2024, in downtown Belgrade. Thus we again affirm the
truly cosmopolitan character of the well-established conference,
adding another city to this rhizomatic community of scholars who
simultaneously discover the new layers of the object of knowledge and
create new plausibilities through their research.

In line with IPW practice, we invite paper and panel proposals on all
topics that center on the Pynchon universe, with 20-minute-long
presentations allotted to every speaker. All talks are given in
plenary form, without breakaway sessions, so as to maintain the common
spirit which the conference has preserved since its foundation. Apart
from the usual individual format, presentations may be jointly given
by two persons, and a group of three or more is not recommended for
this conference. As far as the topic range is concerned, we suggest a
tentative outline, and hope for other innovative ideas that derive
from contemporary discussion in the humanities (and beyond).



How much longer will it take for a shift from the strictly postmodern
to the concept of post-postmodern? How much does this division reflect
on Pynchon’s works chronologically and artistically? The visions of
Pynchon may have ossified in certain practices of literary reception,
but is he still the high priest of postmodernism, unaffected by the
tectonic changes in the modern world, especially the havoc unleashed
on and after 9/11?

If we follow Pynchon’s opus chronologically, how much has it changed
since the time he was only considered to be J.D. Salinger’s pen name?
Scholars may attempt to give various insights into the wealth of
literary influences, both those identified by the author (T.S. Eliot,
Hemingway), alluded to by Pynchon’s narratorial persona, and those
visible on closer inspection. The participants may feel free to extend
their study of literary ties to such contemporary authors as Wallace,
Danielewski, DeLillo, Gaddis and Jennifer Egan, to mention but a few.

Especially alluring is the study of the forms of liberal thought and
practice which pervades all of Pynchon’s texts, from the first short
stories to Bleeding Edge: what do liberal ideas mean to the West and
what do they mean to “the Rest”? Conversely, are there any points of
convergence between socialism and liberalism, with all the opalescent
senses of the words in the receptive contexts?

The concept of the political is a necessary prerequisite to any
contextually based study of Thomas Pynchon, notably so in a historical
discussion – apart from the frequent use of Calvinist doctrine of the
Elect and the Preterite, how far is the writer’s vision formed on
non-American fundamentals, and how far is his fiction concerned with
the structure of the Mumfordian megamachine? More conversation on
Adorno and Horkheimer on the one hand and the social surroundings
which produced any Mittelwerke and its analogies on the other would be
cordially accepted.

Pynchon’s novels inherently engage in a dialogue with history, be it
18th-century expeditions to territories still incompletely wrested
from the control of the indigenous populations or almost
contemporaneous bittersweet snapshots of proletaire families in 1980s
California, again oppressed by various legacies that go back several
generations, all the way to the rooting of Pynchon’s own Anglophone
culture in the hitherto “virginal” expanse of the
Spaniards/Mexicans/Natives/ancient giants. How romanticized is the
view of “the loss of innocence” in diverse “Edens” of the planet when
we contrast it with the scattered vestiges of the
animist/shamanic/tribal world views based on metaphor, allegory and
solely oral history?

With this destabilization of Eurocentricsm comes the notion of the
extent of the colonial project and the suspicious application of
Enlightenment ideas worldwide – how short-sighted and misguided was
the bourgeois society which invented the production line and
consequently the camps of mass extermination as its extremely
perverted form? A fruitful discussion could arise on the modes of
inequality and inequity addressed by Pynchon along the lines of race,
ethnicity, religion, class, ability, gender and the like.

Another point related to colonial visions can be found in the few
brief mentions of Balkan history and geopolitics in Gravity’s Rainbow
or Mason&Dixon, and much more so in several chapters of Against the
Day where some of the main characters go through different
life-changing experiences, making the region seem like a portal to
another (historical) dimension. In a Balkan university center, it
would be convenient to use the opportunity to discuss how much of
Pynchon-related Balkan discourse has been in the domain of discovery,
and how much in the domain of invention. How acceptable are the views
turned stereotypes that the Balkans are a powder keg and the dark
Other of Europe, populated by nations with “long memories and short
fuses”?

The urban milieu in the present day has usually been identified as the
“default” postmodern chronotope, but there is as much displacement of
Pynchon’s plots into the alternative contexts of small towns,
contemporary wastelands, uncharted territories around the globe, even
hippie communes like in Vineland. We also welcome talks that focus on
the interrelation between various spatial narrative frameworks and
their bearing on the stories’ credibility, dynamic and overall effect.
With the narrative aspect in mind, contributions to Pynchon studies
from this vast field of inquiry are most welcome – whether it is
classical narratology, Genettean research into narrative time, or
recent cognitive studies of the phenomena of human experience ordered
into narrative form. The brand-new study by Luc Herman and John Krafft
entitled Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (2023) certainly
deserves special attention from all scholars in the field, as evidence
that classical guidelines of focalization and consciousness can still
yield valuable results in Pynchon and broader scholarship. The recent
acquisition of the writer’s archive – 70 linear feet in length – by
the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, is certainly going
to prove invaluable in specialist academic research into the author’s
work from the synoptic point of view. The vast historical resources of
this library make it an ideal place for the contextualist study of
Pynchon once the materials have been made available.

Another inevitable topic in Thomas Pynchon’s fiction comes from the
sphere of science and technology, and it may even have been
excessively accentuated by the less careful interpreters, since the
author has been trying for decades to foreground the drawbacks of a
society overly dependent on dehumanizing machinery. It is possible to
track the writer’s attitude towards the so-called hard sciences from
“Entropy” to Bleeding Edge, and provide opinions on his implicit
admonitions against the abuses of otherwise neutral technology – from
the SHOCK and SHROUD test dummies to financial forensic leads which
could direct to the possible perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.



To sum up, this is by no means a complete range of topics suitable for
presentation at the conference, and many other ideas from the area of
Pynchon studies would also be gladly received. In retrospect, this
list can serve as a reminder and a template for the addition of new
subjects to the conference agenda:



Pynchon and influences by him / on him (generic and thematic)
Representations of liberalism in Pynchon
Pynchon and (neo)colonialism
Pynchon and the spatial imagination
Pynchon and history
Discourses of crisis
Resistance and counternarratives
Pynchon in intersectional perspectives of race, ethnicity, gender,
class, ability, etc.
Ecology and environment in Pynchon
Pynchon and the technological imagination / Science and technology
Pynchon in comparative perspectives
Pynchon and the Balkans


Prospective participants may submit abstracts of up to 300 words in
.doc or .docx formats to the conference email:
pynchonweek2024 at gmail.com. Panel proposals of three papers should be
1000 words or fewer. Please include with either kind of proposal each
author’s contact information, affiliation, and a hundred-word
biographic sketch listing any relevant publications, papers, and
projects.

The abstract and panel proposal submission deadline is September 1,
2023. However, the scholars who submit their proposals earlier will
receive an earlier answer and be able to organize the trip at ease,
when the ticket price window is more promising. As is the case in all
IPW meetings, the participants do not pay any conference fee.

Any questions about the conference can also be sent to the organizers’
emails, and we will see to it that they are promptly answered:



gargantua_xp at yahoo.com Sergej Macura

anjamaric at gmail.com Aleksandra Vukotić



At present, it is impossible to say what the pandemic situation will
look like in June 2024 in any country of the world, but we hope that
it will pose a much less grave danger than it did at the time of the
previous conference. In any case, should some participants find
themselves in an unfavorable health situation, the Faculty of
Philology can secure a remote video connection for them. If the
participants give their permission, their presentations may be
recorded and saved to a future audio/video database for the future
conferences to draw on as an archive.



We look forward to a new exchange of ideas and opinions, incisive
arguments and lively discussions at the International Pynchon Week in
2024.



Yours sincerely,



Sergej Macura

Aleksandra Vukotić