Contemporary American Fiction Research Articles

Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction.

Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction.

Some write to the future: essays on contemporary Latin American fiction

Some write to the future: essays on contemporary Latin American fiction

Reading American Indian Intellectual Traditions

history remains a terrain over which few scholars have traveled and in which even fewer have set up residence for any extended period. The title of this essay, in fact, will no doubt seem odd or at least novel to a good number of readers. Even those most familiar with some contemporary American Indian intellectuals will not normally recognize the names of more than a few such figures predating the late 1960s. To be sure, many scholars have a modicum of awareness of noncontemporary American Indian intellectuals. Prompted by Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Standing Rock Sioux) skewering of anthropology and other social-science disciplines in Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), for instance, Margot Liberty attempted a bit of academic therapy for herself and other anthropologists by editing a volume of biographical essays on various American Indians who, over the course of the last century, have been informants and ethnologists.1 Literary critics of contemporary American Indian fiction have also looked increasingly to novels predating N. Scott Momaday's (Kiowa-Cherokee) House Made of Dawn (1968) for some sense of perspective and context on more recent novels. D'Arcy McNickle has received the most attention of any of these novelists.2 Other authors by and large either have concerned themselves with general descriptive introductions of the entire field, as in the work of Kenneth Lincoln and Andrew Wiget, or have advocated illchosen overarching theses, as in the works of Charles Larson and Arnold Krupat.3 Even the best of these studies carry with them a sense of having taken only a few steps on forest paths more difficult to traverse than even those in James Fenimore Cooper's imagination.

Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction , and: Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction, and: Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature Thomas Myers Christian K. Messenger . Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 488 pp. $35.00. Philip K. Jason , ed. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991. 269 pp. $32.50 cloth; pb. $13.95. Students and practitioners of contemporary cultural criticism and interdisciplinary studies know how frequently studies of apparently limited features of culture may open up larger vistas, engendering deeper understanding of how the central aspects ofthat culture work. Two recent books on seemingly radically opposed subjects—sport and play in American fiction, the literature of the Vietnam War—are new, valuable reminders of where those cultural portals exist and what may be glimpsed through them. "Sportsworld is the American environment: we need look no further for the pattern of our lives, the rhythms, victories, and defeats," asserts Christian K. Messenger in Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. Identifying the centrality of sport in contemporary American life and testing that obsession against conceptions of the play spirit from Kant and Schiller to Gadamer and Derrida, Messenger offers what he calls "a structural field description of sports fiction," a fluid, wide-ranging analysis of the reciprocal bonds between life and art, sport and play, in American culture. If sport itself is a tension-ridden combination of free play and voracious competition, a meeting of individual desire and cultural inhibition, so, too, suggests the author are the works of art—the novels, plays, and films—that find in sport one of our chief cultural signifiers. A worthy successor to the author's previous work, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (1981), the new book extends discussion of American works on individual and team sport to the present moment. In his Introduction the author offers the keys to his structural approach—multiple uses of A. J. Greimas' "semiotic square" to show the dynamics, tensions, connections, [End Page 828] and contradictions between sport and play in America. Messenger puts the square through many permutations, but the dominant figure has four meaningful categories at its corners: play, individual sports heroism, collective sports heroism, and antiheroism. The book, however, although informed by such structuralist tools, is not finally constrained or controlled by them. Rather, Messenger works fairly and carefully with texts, not allowing the integrity and uniqueness of individual works to be coldly categorized or mechanically slotted into the structural devices. At times the prose becomes theoretically dense, and fashionable critics and schools make brief, not entirely integrated appearances, but overall the relationship between method and text remains organic, adaptable, and illuminating. There is a satisfying comprehensiveness to the study prompted by the author's reasonable three-part structure. In Part One, "Individual Sports Heroism: Male Physical Self-Definition," the author traces the decline of the ritual male sports hero from Hemingway through James Dickey and Thomas McGuane, focusing most centrally on the works of Norman Mailer and fictions of boxing. Part Two, "Individual Sports Heroism: Responses of the Play Spirit," opens wider cultural vistas as the author examines the clash between individual play and institutional constriction in the works of Ken Kesey, Robert Coover, and others. Part Two also contains full discussions of the decline of the school sports hero, the antihero, or "witness," in American sports fiction, and women's sports fiction. Part Three, "Collective Sports Heroism: Fictions of Team Sport," broadens Messenger's cultural web of social, political, and economic aspects even more, with substantial analyses of the fictions of football, baseball, and basketball, discussions that both please and entertain as they assess well-known sports authors—Dan Jenkins, Peter Gent, Robert Coover, Philip Roth, and many others—but also survey more obscure or less publicized authors and texts. Those familiar with American sports fiction will meet a full roster of cagey veterans and hopeful rookies and will find in Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction a worthy, commodious American field of play. Taking the reader into another cultural landscape...

Likely Stories: Essays on Political Philosophy and Contemporary American Literature , and: The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction , and: Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

Likely Stories: Essays on Political Philosophy and Contemporary American Literature , and: The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction , and: Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction

Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction

Pifer, E., Saul Bellow: Against the Grain. Pp. xiii + 208 (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction). Glenday, M. K., Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism. Pp. x + 220 (New Directions in American Studies)

Pifer, E., Saul Bellow: Against the Grain. Pp. xiii + 208 (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction). Glenday, M. K., Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism. Pp. x + 220 (New Directions in American Studies)

Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction.

Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction.

Book Reviews

Abstract Abstract Writing Without Taboos: The New East German Literature J. H. Reid New York: Berg, 1990. 258 pp. Reviewed by Kathleen A. Balgley. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction Arthur M. Saltzman Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. 153 pp. Reviewed by Joseph W. Slade. The Gnostic Pynchon Dwight Eddins Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 173 pp. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon Theodore D. Kharpertian Rutherford, N. J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. 176 pp. 176 pp. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis Alec McHoul and David Wills Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 239 pp. Reviewed by Douglas Keesey.

Designs of darkness in contemporary American fiction

In Designs of Darkness , Arthur M. Saltzman examines some of the ways in which fiction has traditionally conspired to promote a goal-oriented vision of the work of art—and explores the ways in which postmodern (or postrealist) fiction consistently and unavoidably subverts the clarity of this vision.

Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction

Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction

The Other Story of Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller"

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller is a short story which deserves consideration in any comprehensive examination or exploration of contemporary American fiction. Although the story appears in several anthologies designed for use in undergraduate literature classes, it is not an easy work for the typical American college student to appreciate. Its origins in American Indian culture are as foreign to the average undergraduate as are the cultural underpinnings of Yukio Mishima's Patriotism or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. Though Leslie Silko, who was born in Albuquerque in 1948, is a product of the American educational system, she grew up on New Mexico's Laguna Pueblo Reservation where she was immersed in American Indian culture. Her fiction, written in English, is the product of American Indian, rather than Western, cultural values. The cultural context of Storyteller is further complicated by the fact that it is a synthesis of Laguna culture and Silko's experience of Inuit (Eskimo) culture as an artist in residence at Alaska's Rosewater Foundation- on-Ketchikan Creek expressed in what is essentially a Western literary form. The story represents a harmonious joining of American Indian cultures whose values have been forced to confront the alien values of European American culture.

Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction.

Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction.

Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction.

Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction.

Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction , and: The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, and: The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction Jerry A. Varsava Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis , eds. Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 339 pp. $32.50. Tom LeClair . The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. 245 pp. $34.95 cloth; pb. $13.95. Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction brings together a diverse body of generally distinguished work: eleven essays, an interview with Kristeva, and a fine bibliography by Jennifer Jenkins. Many readers will probably wish to start out by reading the first and last essays, which, in addition to being the lengthiest, are also broadest in scope. Authored by Linda Hutcheon, the opening work provides a detailed survey of parodic historiographic metafiction. Hutcheon has of course written extensively, and well, on parody and contemporary experimental fiction, and this essay has the hallmarks of her other work-clarity, unusual range, and perceptive synthesis. Here she reasserts a valid claim she has made elsewhere of postmodern fiction, that the latter is invested not only with self-reflexivity and formal parody but also with historical consciousness. The last essay, Thaïs Morgan's "The Space of Intertextuality," provides a theoretical complement to Hutcheon's exegetical exercise. Morgan surveys twelve different theories of intertextuality, moving from the modernist position of early Eliot through versions offered by Bakhtin and Kristeva and, finally, various poststructuralists. She quite aptly points out that, its new lexicon notwithstanding, much contemporary analysis of intertextuality bears a strong resemblance to old-fashioned influence and source studies. Citing Reuben Brower's 1957 study of allusion in Pope as a traditional treatment of literary relations, she points out commonalities between the latter and certain positions taken up by, variously, Bloom, Kristeva, and Genette. Morgan concludes with brief although convincing remarks on Foucault and the rich(er) possibilities offered by the latter's broad, epistemologically-centered view of interdiscursivity. The remaining nine essays are narrower in focus and either offer a reading of particular works or an intertextual analysis of a nonliterary form. Space limitations allow little more than a terse description of these. In an original and thoughtful piece, John Matthews considers how parody in selected Barth novels works to provide a formal literary solution for the "predicament of social parasitism" suffered by the comfortable and complacent American bourgeoisie. Focusing on Gardner's Grendel and Hawkes's The Blood Oranges, Heide Ziegler puts forward a typology of contemporary parody. In the most theoretical of the interpretive essays, Alan Singer discusses Bakhtinian dialogicality before going on to analyze aspects of Gaddis' Carpenter's Gothic, one of the more important American fictions of recent years. Charles Caramello reviews intertextual relations between Henry James and Gertrude Stein, whereas Ronald Schleifer looks at the theme of intertextuality and violence in Dreiser and Mailer. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. investigates the orchestration of black female voices in a variety of fictional and nonfictional works, particularly Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice [End Page 255] Walker's The Color Purple. Kathleen Hulley outlines the intertext of Kathy Acker's raw and abrasive fiction. Defining intertextuality in broad cultural terms, John Carlos Rowe attempts a selective thematic summary of popular American TV shows of the last forty years. Finally, in a meandering essay that considers, among many other things, Garbage-Pail children's cards, eugenics, and Ronald Reagan's surgeries—although very little literature—Gabriele Schwab looks at "Cyborgs and Cybernetic Intertexts." The title of this collection notwithstanding, the essays by Caramello, Rowe, and Schwab are obviously not about contemporary American fiction. In their Preface, the editors suggest that the lowest common denominator among the collected works is an intention to "address the projects and limits of 'discourse' within the multi-discursivity of contemporary American culture." If this is true, title and text could be better matched. Alternatively, perhaps the editors should have more earnestly sought out contributions dealing with the subject matter of their title. Certainly, both "intertextuality" and postmodern American fiction—not to mention their interaction-are sufficiently broad and rich phenomena to support the demands of a major anthology...

The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.

The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.

Intertextuality and contemporary American fiction

Intertextuality and contemporary American fiction

Reminiscence and re-creation in contemporary American fiction

Reminiscence and re-creation in contemporary American fiction

Contemporary American Fiction: Critical Reformulations

Contemporary American Fiction: Critical Reformulations

Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction

Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction