Guest editors: Sergej Macura (University of Belgrade), Gábor Tamás Molnár (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

The international reception of Thomas Pynchon’s work has not received much scholarly attention, even though Pynchon is generally recognized as one of the most influential American prose writers of our era. The guest editors of this special issue intend to focus on Pynchon’s reception in a specific region, a broadly conceived Eastern Europe (potentially including the Balkans, the Baltic states and former Soviet republics such as Russia and Ukraine). Since Pynchon’s early career covered parts of the Cold War period, the study of how his works were received beyond the Iron Curtain may reveal tendencies of censorship, institutions of cultural politics – and ways for translators, publishers and critics to work around them – in Soviet satellite countries. The period around the first wave of Pynchon’s reception in the Warsaw Pact countries is also a field of change, since introducing a US-American author to Poland or Romania in the 1970s and 1980s was a whiff of a completely new literary culture and carried with it a sense of clash between communism and capitalism. The political institutions of publishing were not the same in any two countries, and studying the publication history of Pynchon’s work can provide a lot of ground for the discussion of ideological dynamics in this part of the continent.

We ask contributors to investigate the overall diachronic context of transplanting Pynchon’s works into the recipient cultures, the political history of the region being an obvious point of reference. How did the fall of communism and the later Eastward extension of Western institutions and frameworks influence the reception of American writers, Pynchon in particular? Which works were published first, in what venues did they appear, and did they have any documented impact on the recipient cultures? Probably for reasons of brevity and accessibility, The Crying of Lot 49 was the first fully translated book by Pynchon in several countries (including Yugoslavia and Hungary), appearing around 1990. However, individual chapters of V. were published in literary journals in Romania and Poland earlier. An anthology of contemporary American short stories, named Entropy and containing Pynchon’s story of the same title, was published in Hungarian as early as 1980. The first translations often influence later ones, especially if the same translator translates multiple books. From the 1990s, decisions on which volumes to translate and publish may have been influenced by considerations of profitability, the availability of translation grants, and the (re)emergence of a readership that has had access to the international book market and could read works in English.

On a related point, we are also interested in the critical reception of Pynchon’s work in the region. We expect relatively sparse evidence of critical studies up to the late 1990s and the spread of online communication. When studying later periods, fan sites, blogs, interviews and media content may be relevant, but we are mainly interested in books, articles appearing in academic and literary journals, and MA and PhD theses. We would like to better understand the ways in which regional scholars working in American Studies or Comparative Literature have found to connect with international research trends, frameworks, and institutions. We are interested to see how the advent of the current publishing industry has influenced, benefitted (or hindered) the regional reception of Pynchon’s works. Which theories have made the most significant impact on the study of Pynchon in Eastern Europe? Which critical studies, which monographs have been the most influential, and how has the situation changed in the last two decades? Is there an inevitable belatedness in studying an English-speaking author in a non-English-speaking country, or can scholars in this region make original contributions to the field?

Overall, we are inviting one of two types of contributions to the issue:

1) Historical overviews of one or more aspects of Pynchon’s reception in a particular country and language, either in isolation or in comparative perspective. Such essays may focus on the history of translation, publication, circulation, critical reception of Pynchon’s stories, essays and novels. Such  essays could take a contextualist approach and may benefit from framing their object historically, using either traditional methods of intellectual history and comparative literature, or more recent approaches such as distant reading and quantitative methods in translation studies.

2) In-depth studies of the problems of translating Pynchon’s works into a particular language or languages. Essays of this type may focus either on a single work or a single set of issues—some aspects of Pynchon’s style, segments of his vocabulary, even specific passages. We expect essays of this type to offer copious textual detail and use theoretical framing derived from translation studies.

Timeline:
January 31, 2025: submission of article proposals of max. 300 words and a short (150-word) biographical note to molnar.gabor.tamas@btk.elte.hu and sergej.macura@fil.bg.ac.rs February 20, 2025: decision of acceptance or rejection of proposals by the editors
May 31, 2025: deadline for article submissions

In The Country and The City (1973) the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote that the landscapes of the country are associated ‘with the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue’, whereas, city is associated with ‘the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light (p.1. 1973). Williams goes on to claim that ‘powerful hostile associations’ have developed between the city and country, with the ‘city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition’ and ‘the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation’ and that the ‘contrast between country and city’ is a ‘fundamental’ approach to literary representations to these different landscapes. (p.1. 1973). This conference will aim to consider the work that short story writers have done in supporting, disputing and subverting these claims in their depictions of landscapes. It will aim to consider a plethora of landscapes including, but not limited to, rural, urban, barren, populated, cosmopolitan, pastoral, flourishing, dying, futuristic, ancient, native, foreign, hostile, welcoming.

The other strand of short fiction writing that this conference will consider is depictions of temporality. Michael Trussler, in his paper in Contemporary Literature, writes that ‘short stories seem particularly concerned with investigating the nature of temporality. An elemental human experience is the chronological progression of time; we respond to this rudimentary condition by essentially narrativizing this process through linking events into a continuous series. Short stories intimate, however, that translating events into a continuum potentially reduces the ‘meaning’ of an event to its relative significance within an ongoing series. Opposed to synoptic assimilation (the method most historians and novelists favour), short stories maintain that the narratives we tell ourselves often mask the incongruities of existential temporality’ (p.599-600, 2002). This conference will aim to consider the relationship that the short story form has in its depictions of temporality and ask does the short story form do things uniquely, that other literary forms don’t do, in its depiction of temporality.

This conference will also engage with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Bakhtin defines a chronotope as ‘time space’, which allows literary critics to analyse how the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ is ‘artistically represented in literature’ (p.84. 1981). Bakhtin goes on to state that in a chronotope, ‘Time […] thickens […and] becomes artistically visible’, and space becomes ‘charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (p.250. 1981.) We aim to bring together scholars with an interest in examining these tensions and the different ways in which short story depicts landscapes and temporality. The conference’s goal is not to look at the short form in antagonism to other literary forms, but rather, we invite papers that cross-examine the marginal spaces that short fiction occupies and the intersections between landscape and temporality, that the short story form can shine a light upon.

Continue reading “ENSFR Annual Conference — Manchester October 23-25, 2023: Short Fiction: Landscape and Temporality”