Stephen Hock (Batten University)
At the conclusion of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006), the Chums of Chance skyship Inconvenience becomes a generational ship, one whose inhabitants, as the novel’s final sentence tells us, “fly toward grace.” Readers may be forgiven for having suspected at the time that that image, coming at the conclusion of Pynchon’s longest novel, served as a valedictory gesture to cap off Pynchon’s career. Apropos of this year’s NeMLA Convention keyword (Re)generation, however, Pynchon subverted expectations by following Against the Day in short order with Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), each offering further permutations of characteristically Pynchonian tropes. With a new novel, Shadow Ticket, recently announced for publication in late 2025, now seems an appropriate time to consider the ways in which these late Pynchon novels allow us to (re)generate our understanding of an author whose career now spans over sixty years, and several literary generations.
Proposals are invited for papers addressing Pynchon’s twenty-first-century novels, including proposals that reserve space to discuss Shadow Ticket in dialogue with one or more of Pynchon’s other late novels. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):
· The persistence, (re)generation, or transcendence of postmodernist modes in Pynchon’s late fiction.
· Pynchon’s ongoing historiographic-metafictional mapping of U.S. history as it pertains to distinctly twenty-first-century concerns.
· Pynchon’s (re)turn after Against the Day to relatively shorter novels focused on detective figures.
· (Re)generational themes within the late novels.
Proposals that answer this year’s NeMLA Convention call for “the creation of new forms of scholarship, both empirical and philosophical,” through creative, experimental, and other nontraditional approaches are particularly encouraged.
With a new novel, Shadow Ticket, recently announced for publication in late 2025, now seems an appropriate time to consider the ways in which Pynchon's late novels allow us to (re)generate our understanding of an author whose career now spans over sixty years, and several literary generations. Proposals are invited for papers addressing Pynchon’s twenty-first-century novels, including proposals that reserve space to discuss Shadow Ticket in dialogue with one or more of Pynchon’s other late novels.