A Brief History of International Pynchon Week

The predecessor of International Pynchon Week, not yet called that, was a conference in Warwick in 1994, organized by Dan O'Hara and Eric Cassidy. The first IPW proper was hosted by Luc Herman in Antwerp and Eric Alan Weinstein in 1998, and it gradually developed into a biannual event with its own traditions: no conference fees, everyone gets the same time for their paper, and the anarchic mode of organization is based on just passing the torch to whoever wants to host the next one. We asked former IPW organizers to give us brief personal memories about their conferences, updating the catalog as we receive their reports.

IPW 1998 (Antwerp/London)

IPW 1998 was a two-part conference: two days on Gravity's Rainbow in Antwerp and three days in London on various Pynchon topics, with a day for travel in between. The papers at the University of Antwerp became Pynchon Notes 42-43, starting with Steven Weisenburger's keynote on Haunted History and ending with the late Brian McHale on Gravity's Angels. There were about 75 people in the audience. The conference was financed thanks to a modest entrance fee and a nice grant from the university. It was entitled Gravity's Rainbow: The First 25 Years, and it took place in a lecture hall on the quad of the city campus. Extracurricular activities included a showing of the documentary Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Johan Grimonprez and a musical performance, immediately after the final paper, by Vox Libris. The poster for the conference featured a historic picture of V-2 damage to a street in Antwerp that was taken by the city photographer whose only job it was to document the many disasters. Email was already a fact of life at the time of the conference, but attendees still had to send an (orange) card to the organizer in order to confirm their presence. The greatest reward for me was that paper discussion was lively, respectful and intense. Speaking of intense, my organizer backlash was such that I slept through some parts of the London conference, which was organised by Eric Weinstein.

Luc Herman

IPW 2002 (Cologne):

In response to Sascha’s email about writing a paragraph about the Pynchon Week 2002 in Cologne, I wrote that had he told me two days ago that there had indeed been a Pynchon Week in Cologne, I would have said no. blackout. Nothing. Nada. But then the internet reminded me that, indeed, there had been such a week.
The papers presented at the conference which was held at the University of Köln in June 2002, while John Krafft was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the University's English Department. Are collected in the issue “Site-Specific: Pynchon | Germany” of Pynchon Notes. The idea behind the conference was to trace "Germany"-or better, various "Germanies" -in Pynchon's work.
In our call for papers, John and I noted that the Pynchon Notes index to Gravity's Rainbow is framed, quite symptomatically, by two German references: the real city Aachen and the imaginary city Zwölfkinder. Apart from the fact that John was in Germany at the time, "Germany" seemed to us to be an interesting topic for a conference on Pynchon held in Germany because in Pynchon's work Germany has been repeatedly and relentlessly coded and overcoded, has been a text to decipher and redecipher, a glyph to read and reread, a discursive as well as a real space to walk, drive or ride through, to fly across, to traverse from the height of the Brocken to the landscapes of "Deep Germany" (Against the Day 661) and the Stollen of the underground Mittelwerke. Germany has spawned fictional filmmakers such as Gerhardt von Göll, companies such as Spottbilligfilm AG and Psychochemie AG, witches such as Geli Tripping, engineers such as Kurt Mondaugen, impresarios such as Miklos Thanatz and G. M. B. Haftung, Verbindungsmenschen such as Wimpe, and feats of specialization such as the infamous toiletship Rücksichtslos. German references span Wagner to Weber, Rilke to Rathenau, Euler to Einstein, IG Farben to Ufa, Grimm to Grimmelshausen, Thurn and Taxis to Radio Cologne, and Bavaria to Peenemünde. At the same time, Pynchon's work has had a notable influence on contemporary German literature.
At first glance, Germany is to Pynchon as Tom is to Jerry: an evil, relentless force whose sole mission is to kill and to destroy. It is also, however, as the Catholic Church is to Weberian Protestantism and as German Idealism is to American Pragmatism. Given the tendency to conceptualize such pairings only as oppositions-Tom's world needs Jerry as much as Jerry's needs Tom-Germany has come to embody one of the most consistently puzzling oppositions in Pynchon: "transcendent meaning, or only the earth"; "the truth's numinous beauty... or only a power spectrum" (The Crying of Lot 49 181).
Pynchon’s texts abound in moments-such as the Kirghiz Light in Gravity's Rainbow and the Tunguska Event in Against the Day - when it is impossible to decide whether one has to do with the profane physical or the sacred|transcendental. Germany is so darkly fascinating to Pynchon because it is a site where the grim rationality of the profane - such as the "Schwärmerei for Control" (Gravity's Rainbow 238) - and the grandeur of the transcendental are conflated. Most of Pynchon’s German references concern the unsolvable function of Germany and of the German soul.

Hanjo Berressem

IPW 2004 (Valetta)
Organized by Vaska Tumir.

IPW 2006 (Granada):

I decided to organise the 2006 Pynchon Conference in Granada because I had enjoyed myself so much at my first conference, the 2004 Malta Conference. But I thought, there's no way we can equal the cruise round the harbour in Valetta. Still, people made do with the visit to the Alhambra, and some, off their own bat, took advantage to go up to Sierra Nevada, still a bit snowy in June, and to go down to the coast in Motril or Salobreña.
All the administration for the Conference was done by the people at the University of Granada's Centre of Modern Languages. My son Francisco had spent the previous year painting scenes from Pynchon's novels and the Centre put on an exhibition. He said, perhaps I can sell one or two: he didn't sell a single one. Now we are pleased because we still have those paintings of Mason and Dixon. The funny thing is that after the conference was over, the Centre received an anonymous cheque in its account and we never discovered where it came from. My son is convinced it came from Pynchon, but some people keep insisting that Pynchon doesn't exist.

Celia Wallhead

IPW 2008 (Munich):

Attending IPW 2026 in Granada was one of the most positive formative events any grad student could wish for, and I found it a place of generosity, kindness, and exactly my kind of obsessive nerdiness. Naturally, I decided I want to host one myself, and after I found out there wasn't even a committee or anything I could ask for permission, I simply stated my intentions, which was met with more generosity and support, and so we spend five days in June at Amerikahaus Munich (and one evening at the Amerika-Institut watching a World Cup game and another at the Hofbräuhaus). Most talks were about Against the Day, Pynchon's latest novel to date, and I only gave the conference the title "Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives" so I could rip off the great cover design of the novel for the poster. Heinz Ickstadt opened the conference with a great paper, but before him the US Consul General actually stole the show with a really funny welcome address that made us all wonder if she (or her scriptwriter) wasn't a Pynhead herself. The best compliment I got about the event was a dear colleague of mine telling me that it was his first academic conference and he thought all of them were like that until he went to another one; I feel the same way about all IPWs.

IPW 2010 (Lublin):
Organized by Zofia Kolbuszewska.

IPW 2013 (Durham):
Organized by Sam Thomas.

IPW 2015 (Athens):

The International Pynchon Week 2015 in Athens started with Georgios (or simply Yorgos) skipping through the streets of Durham in 2013, having (quite easily, admittedly) convinced Panteion University to host the conference in Athens and ended with Ali giving his rather memorable closing remarks and the attendees wearing The-Simpsons-inspired Pynchonian bags on their heads to take some pictures. The in-between was a pleasant yet anxious ride. The first part was scrambling to secure funding during the Greek crisis, with many people and organizations stepping up: Luc Herman and the University of Antwerp, the University of Michigan, and the publishing house Pilotless Press, for example.
The most interesting part of the preparations, however, was how to choose the abstracts: So many amazing presentations proposed, so little time. And who are we to dictate who gets to speak and who doesn’t? Well, we’re the organizers of the conference, it’s literally in the job description. We had some rules to help more people get a chance to be considered: The deadline was somewhat extended, because it was still “yesterday” somewhere in the Pacific, the abstracts were considered purely on their merits, even if they didn’t meet other requirements, things like that. We even decided to hold an experimental panel, with more, but shorter presentations, in order to highlight the inherent connections of some works.
The conference itself was a huge success, at least if you ask Georgios and Ali. Hopefully others felt the same. Of course, the air-conditioning was spotty, the Wi-Fi was dodgy, the light controls were wonky and the mic was nowhere to be found until the last day, but none of that mattered. We had free chapbooks for everyone, a picture exhibition by Dup Goevaers, plenty of coffee and food and, of course, amazing papers and stimulating conversations. What else does an IPW need?

Ali Chetwynd & Georgios Maragos

IPW 2017 (La Rochelle):
Organized by Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd and Gilles Chamerois.

IPW 2019 (Rome):
Organized by Umberto Rossi, Paolo Simonetti, and Giorgio Mariani.

IPW 2022 (Vancouver):
Organized by Jeff Severs.

IPW 2024 (Belgrade):

My first IPW experience was in La Rochelle in 2017, after which I clung to the idea of qualifying as a presenter at the next one in Rome two years later. The joy of those two conferences was not marred at all by the fact that the Covid pandemic delayed the Vancouver IPW by a year, so I don't know how, my proposal for Belgrade in 2024 was wholeheartedly accepted. Only then did I see that it would take a lot of email correspondence to coordinate all the academics from three continents. Fortunately, I was assisted immensely by my predecessors Jeff Severs and Sascha Pöhlmann, who helped me out whenever I had to decide on the right organisational path. If it had not been for my dear colleage from the English Department, Dr. Aleksandra Vukotić, the necessary administration would never have been completed. So, much of the credit goes to Anya, who also gave a brilliant presentation. All in all, I rejected perhaps 2 or 3 proposals, and there were about 40 of them in the Book of Abstracts, with 36 presentations delivered (I may be wrong, as is often the case in multitasking). It may seem a curiosity, but we even printed the Book of Abstracts in 70 copies, so it could become a collector's item in the future. Jeff put in a lot of work with the GoFundMe initiative, and some travel costs were thus reduced; I have to express my sincere thanks to the members of all the boards – Programme, Scientific and Organising – for their reliability and prompt upholding of the highest standards when it comes to events of this type, especially in a country that is beset with multiple issues of demography, politics, finance, etc. (It takes a village to bring up an IPW.) On the other hand, such a setting can prove motivating for the Pynchon scholars, as they were all aware of the fact that they were coming into a Zone of sorts. But when all those hectic months came together at the conference, there was little I had to do, just sit back and relax in the sessions. Our sprightly student helpers elevated the experience even further with their logistical and catering abilities. I need to mention the gallantry of the National Library of Serbia, where the last day's sessions took place. What I consider especially pleasing was the series of extracurricular activities after the conference presentations, like a free visit to the Nikola Tesla museum (Anya's idea again), strolls in downtown Belgrade to Kalemegdan Fortress, and the evening with live rock music played by a cover band. When you add all the magic scents, sights, sounds and light of mid-June in Belgrade, from dawn to dusk, we had a pretty good liftoff in my opinion.

Sergej Macura

I remember the mixture of excitement and disbelief when Sergej Macura first broke the news that the world’s most ardent Pynchon scholars wanted to bring the fourteenth International Pynchon Week to Belgrade, and that he thought the two of us could handle it. It was two years before the event, which I believed was well in advance, so I reckoned there would be plenty of time for plans and contingencies. Sergej explained early on that IPW runs on a different logic from other academic conferences. No hierarchies, no keynote celebrities, no conference tourism, just a close circle of colleagues and old friends who gather to talk Pynchon in their own way. This was lucky. We had no sponsors, and only a modest nod from our University and the Ministry of Education, as well as a kind promise from the National Library of Serbia to extend their support in logistics and prestige, though not in funds. The Museum of Nikola Tesla treated us to a free guided tour, which was much appreciated and heartwarming. Then the days quickened, and soon we were improvising against what seemed to be mostly technical and bureaucratic obstacles, from grainy poster prints to the unexpected problem with obtaining approval for the publication of the Book of Abstracts. When I look back, however, I don’t remember IPW 2024 for these glitches, but for the spirit of camaraderie that held everything together. And if I had to single out one key element of our organizational venture, what I consider its heart and soul, it would be our team of student volunteers, doing wonders every step of the way.

Aleksandra Vukotić