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Chapter 42 - Fandom

from Part III - Approaches and Readings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2019

By
David Kipen
Edited by
Inger H. Dalsgaard
Inger H. Dalsgaard
Affiliation:
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
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Summary

Is it OK to be a fan? Does every great writer even have fans? No one would ever think to consecrate April 13 as “Henry James in Public Day.” Yet Thomas Pynchon fans around the world pose with their paperbacks every year on his birthday, sipping their Trystero Coffee like monkish communicants partaking of the Eucharist. What is it about Pynchon that inspires such loyalty? Partly, of course, it is the extraordinarily high quality of his work and the exasperating thickheadedness of those unwilling to recognize it. But what are fandom’s gifts to more traditional scholarship, criticism, literary canon-ization?

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Thomas Pynchon in Context , pp. 341 - 345
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Fandom
  • Edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
  • Book: Thomas Pynchon in Context
  • Online publication: 31 May 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683784.043
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  • Fandom
  • Edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
  • Book: Thomas Pynchon in Context
  • Online publication: 31 May 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683784.043
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fandom
  • Edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
  • Book: Thomas Pynchon in Context
  • Online publication: 31 May 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683784.043
Available formats
×