Postmodern American literature and its other

Abstract

Although literary postmodernism has been defined in terms of difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and plurality, some of the most vaunted authors of postmodern American fiction--such as Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, and other white male authors--often fail to adequately represent the distinct subjectivities of African Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor, and the global periphery. In this groundbreaking study, W. Lawrence Hogue exposes the ways in which much postmodern American literature privileges a typically Eurocentric, male-oriented type of subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying the ethnic or gendered Other. In contrast to the dominant white male perspective on postmodernism, Hogue points to African American, American Indian, and women authors within the American postmodern canon--Rikki Ducornet, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, and Gerald Vizenor--who work against these structures of stereotype and bias, resulting in a literary postmodernism that more genuinely respects and represents difference.