The Presence of Postmodernism in Contemporary American Literature

Abstract

The year 2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s seminal essays “Periodizing the 60s” and “Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” and the twenty-fifth anniversary of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. More generally, the works that form the cornerstones of our understanding of postmodernism and its periodization, including seminal works by Linda Hutcheon, Ihab Hassan, Andreas Huyssen, John Barth, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, are by now on average 30–40 years old. Most of these macrotheoretical models of postmodernism that continue to influence analyses of contemporary literature mainly base their insights on cultural artifacts dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Given the changes American literature has undergone over the course of the past five decades or so, this begs the question: can the term postmodernism and its associated concepts and debates offer us a relevant set of tools for the analysis of recent literary production? What might we stand to gain from talking about postmodernism now? Or, to put this question more awkwardly (though fittingly, as will become clear, for this essay will deal with a range of awkward terms and temporal and logical propositions): what is the time of postmodernism’s presence? Already in 1993 Raymond Federman proclaimed the end of postmodernism in his book Critifiction, and since the 1990s discussions of postmodernism’s possible exhaustion and its aftermath have become increasingly frequent. Still, as Andrew Hoberek argues, citing Jeremy Green, in his introduction to the 2007 special issue of