Vineland Reread - Peter Coviello

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Résumé :
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.

Biographie:
Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent books include Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs (2018) and Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (2019).

Sommaire:
Prologue: Whatever?s Fair
Part I
1. The Great Southcoast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid (?94)
2. They Woke, the Thanatoids Awoke (?02)
Part II
3. Scabland Garrison State (?08)
4. Secret Retributions (?19? ...)
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index