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.
General
Imprint: |
Columbia University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Rereadings |
Release date: |
2021 |
First published: |
2021 |
Authors: |
Peter Coviello
|
Dimensions: |
198 x 129mm (L x W) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
152 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-231-18520-2 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
General
|
LSN: |
0-231-18520-0 |
Barcode: |
9780231185202 |
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