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Thomas Pynchon's fiction has been considered masculinist,
misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal
experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to
complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the
present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether
Pynchon's representations of women are sexist, feminist, or
reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of
sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether
queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his
departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or
critique the gendering of genre. Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender
reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of
Pynchon's writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core,
it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as
liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation
with sex and gender conditions his fiction's whole worldview. The
essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's
novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such
topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the
writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting
representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches
to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the
collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.
Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the
revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist
politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and
elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the
New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the
psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points
of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural
sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the
subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer
clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political
philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in
Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in
order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by
the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values
growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project
that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.
This book captures a cross-section of the most significant recent
developments in criticism on one of the most challenging authors of
our time. It brings together essays by a new generation of Pynchon
critics alongside some more established names in the field,
building on and moving beyond existing critical paradigms in the
study of Pynchon's work. In a critical landscape in which the
postmodernism of Pynchon's earlier novels has been thoroughly
established, this collection presents fresh analytical
methodologies and new perspectives on Pynchon's fiction informed by
the more expansive, globalized, and politicized network models that
undergird recent advances in American literary theory and
criticism. The New Pynchon Studies illustrates how Pynchon's later
novels, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, demand a
re-orientation of our approach to his entire oeuvre and enables
readers to trace lines of continuity and development in his writing
from V. to the present day.
Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture employs the
revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist
politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and
elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the
New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the
psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points
of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural
sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the
subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer
clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political
philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in
Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in
order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by
the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values
growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project
that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.
Thomas Pynchon's fiction has been considered masculinist,
misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal
experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to
complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the
present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether
Pynchon's representations of women are sexist, feminist, or
reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of
sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether
queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his
departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or
critique the gendering of genre. Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender
reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of
Pynchon's writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core,
it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as
liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation
with sex and gender conditions his fiction's whole worldview. The
essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's
novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such
topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the
writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting
representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches
to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the
collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.
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