Pynchonian

— Academic feminists have for a decade worried that their “acceptance,” when, how, and to what extent it has occurred, is a form of repressive tolerance, a pretense on the part of departments of English that their enterprise could be smothered and subsumed under an expanded definition of “institutional criticism.” And though the rhetoric of Pynchon studies takes much the same line of argument, I suggest that the primary reasons for Pynchonians’ anxieties have less to do with repressive tolerance than with, for one thing, the idea of the academy as mausoleum and, for another, the nostalgia consequent upon the death of the author—a nostalgia complicated in Pynchon’s case by the nagging suspicion that it is we who have killed him.