Stephen Hock (Virginia Wesleyan University)
shoc@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

With a new detective novel, Shadow Ticket, recently announced for publication in late 2025, now seems an appropriate time to consider what to make of Thomas Pynchon’s turn to (relatively) straightforward detective fiction in recent years in Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013). How do these late Pynchon detective novels speak to ongoing epistemological questions in the twenty-first century? Proposals are invited for papers addressing Pynchon’s twenty-first-century detective novels, including proposals that reserve space to discuss Shadow Ticket in dialogue with either or both of Pynchon’s other late detective novels.

In his classic Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale identifies Thomas Pynchon as an author whose career illustrates what McHale describes as a shift from a modernist mode of writing whose dominant concerns are epistemological to a postmodernist mode where ontological questions become dominant. For McHale, this shift takes place following The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a novel that McHale describes as one that “belongs to the genre of detective story…in a sense,” taking up epistemological questions even as it pushes up against the postmodernist ontological questions that come to dominate Pynchon’s next novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Indeed, for McHale, the detective story is “the epistemological genre par excellence.” Apropos of this year’s SAMLA Conference theme, Knowledge, readers might wonder what, then, to make of Pynchon’s turn to more (relatively) straightforward detective fiction in recent years in Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013). With another novel focusing on a detective, Shadow Ticket, recently announced for publication in late 2025, now seems an appropriate time to consider the ways in which these late Pynchon detective novels speak to ongoing epistemological questions in the twenty-first century, more than sixty years after Pynchon began his career.

Proposals are invited for papers addressing Pynchon’s twenty-first-century detective novels, including proposals that reserve space to discuss Shadow Ticket in dialogue with either or both of Pynchon’s other late detective novels. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):

· Modernist epistemologies, postmodernist ontologies, and later permutations.

· The evolution of Pynchon’s detective figures in his twenty-first-century novels.

· Pynchon’s employment of historical fiction as a means of engaging with contemporary epistemological questions.

Proposals that speak to this year’s SAMLA Conference call for “exploring the ways we know now,” through creative, experimental, and other nontraditional approaches are particularly encouraged.

Please submit proposals through SAMLA’s Ballast site at https://samla.ballastacademic.com/ by July 15. For more information, please contact Stephen Hock at shock@vwu.edu.