Contemporary American Fiction Research Articles

Understanding contemporary American science fiction: the age of maturity, 1970-2000

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. He identifies influences and events central to the genre's growth, including the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

Paradigms of paranoia: the culture of conspiracy in contemporary American fiction

The recent popularity of The DaVinci Code and The Matrix trilogy exemplifies the fascination Americans have with conspiracy-driven subjects. Though scholars have suggested that in modern times the JFK assassination initiated an industry of conspiracy (i.e., Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Area 51, Iran-Contra Affair), Samuel Chase Coale reminds us in this book that conspiracy is founda-tional in American culture - from the apocalyptic Biblical narratives in early Calvinist households to the fear of Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant populations in the 19th century. Coale argues that contemporary culture - a landscape characterized by doubt, ambigulty, fragmentation, information overload, and mistrust - has fostered a radical skepticism so pervasive that the tendency to envision or construct conspiracies often provides the best explanation for the chaos that surrounds us. Conspiracy as embodied in narrative form provides a fertile field for explorations of the anxiety lying at the heart of the postmodern experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLilio's Underworld, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Paradise, Joan Didlon's Democracy, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, and Paul Auster's New York City Trilogy are some of the texts Coale examines for their representations of isolated individuals at the center of massive, anonymous master plots that lay beyond their control. These narratives remind us that our historical sense of national identity has often been based on the demonizing of others and that American fiction arose and still flourishes with apocalyptic visions - in the very marrow of its narrative bones.

Dinarzad's children: an anthology of contemporary Arab American fiction

Dinarzad's children: an anthology of contemporary Arab American fiction

Nancy Drew Revisited: Female Private Eyes in Contemporary American Fiction

Created in the 1930s by the Stratemeyer Syndicate of writers, the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories are still very popular today both with teenage girls and American female detective writers. What are the reasons for the enduring appeal of the girl detective? Is Nancy Drew really, as some women writers assert, the literary mother of the new breed of adult fictional women sleuths in the United States? What are the differences and the similarities between Nancy Drew and those fictional sleuths? Why do so many contemporary American female detective writers still somehow, consciously or not, take Nancy Drew as a model for their own fictional private eyes? Those are some of the mysteries this article is going to try and solve.

Humoring resistance: laughter and the excessive body in contemporary Latin American women's fiction

Humoring resistance: laughter and the excessive body in contemporary Latin American women's fiction

Whose story is it? Sindbad the sailor in literature and film

Sindbad the Sailor is one of the most popular stories in the world. It has been recast continuously in children's stories, Hollywood films, Arabic poetry and modern American and Arabic fiction. In its travel across cultures, historical eras, genres and media, the story has always managed to transform itself into something that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. This article looks at the workings of the narrative, which effect such transformations and, more particularly, at the role of ideology, genre ideology and subjectivity in driving narrative and shaping story. It traces the transformations of Sindbad the Sailor in Hollywood films and contemporary American and Arabic fiction then rereads the Nights story, relating the sources of change to the culture that produced each version.

Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970

Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970

Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970 by Kenneth Millard

45 o Reviews was campaigning forthe freedom to read. Then, there is the second contender forthe most-censored novel, Huckleberry Finn. Steinle recognizes the relevance of this novel to her subject but again never pursues it, never mentions, forexample, Nat Hentoff's sardonic 1982 novel about this censorship case, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. As a result, although In Cold Fear performs the useful exercise of reminding us of the controversies Salinger's novel has generated, the study only goes a limited way towards explaining why those controversies should have taken place. University of Liverpool David Seed Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction since 1970. By Kenneth Millard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. viii + 328pp. ?10.99. ISBN 0-19-871178-6. With the exception of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and a handful of others, all literature is subject to the vagaries of fashion. Even a writer as central to the canon as Dickens was fora time somewhat marginalized by F. R. Leavis's decision that he did not belong to the Great Tradition, and Leavis and T. S. Eliot between them promoted John Donne to, and briefly relegated Milton from, the premier league of English poets. In the field of contemporary American fiction,however, shifts in the reputations of authors are so rapid and radical that constructing any sort of canon is a risky venture. Ken? neth Millard himself points out in his introduction that, of the twenty-two writers discussed in Tony Tanner's City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London: Cape, 1971), only two (Philip Roth and John Updike) also feature in Contemporary American Fiction. He justifies his decision to omit Pynchon, Mailer, Malamud, Bellow , Barth, Hawkes, Vonnegut, Burroughs, and Heller on the grounds that their 'best and most influential work [.. .] belongs to an earlier period' (p. 3), but does not bother to account for the absence of many of the other writers featured in Tanner's book, presumably because their relative obscurity today automatically disqualifies them from consideration. Whereas in 1971 the future of American fiction seemed likely to belong to ludic postmodernism, with the surreal fiction of writers such as Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan, and the black humour of Vonnegut and Heller all the rage, the resurgence of realism as the prevailing mode of American fiction in the thirty years since then has diminished the reputation of many avant-garde writers, while more traditional (and more versatile) novelists like Updike and Roth have gone from strength to strength. Millard is acutely aware of the fact that any attempt to 'represent late twentiethcentury fiction of the United States in a single survey [. . .] beg[s] questions about cultural value and ideological choices', and that such a survey will inevitably be 'a syn? thesis of differentand competing critical agendas' (p. 3). Because ofthe 'extraordinary proliferation of excellent primary texts', no selection can possibly be comprehensive, and it seems unfair to criticize Millard for his choice of texts, though I cannot help wondering, as a specialist in American-Jewish fiction, why Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, Hortense Calisher, and Emily Prager are excluded from the book's lengthy bibliography of canonical American fiction. In so far as Contemporary American Fiction is, as Millard puts it, 'a work of advocacy that hopes to stimulate a passionate engagement with them [the primary texts]' (p. 7), it succeeds admirably. Millard's readings are invariably sensitive and thoughtful , and, considering the very limited space (typically five or six pages) allocated to the discussion of each text, he manages very well to convey a sense of their rich complexity. But here is the problem: critical studies are also subject to the vagaries of fashion, and Millard's book has fallen victim to the current culture in academic MLR, 98.2, 2003 451 publishing in which monographs are out, and textbooks are in. Whereas Tanner was allowed to survey a wide range of writers and at the same time develop a detailed and sophisticated thesis, Millard is clearly constrained by the format of the book he is writing, and by the market he is addressing, so that we are only allowed brief glimpses of where his interests might...

An Interview with Michael Cunningham

AN INTERVIEW WITH Michael Cunningham Michael Cunningham Michael Cunningham is the author of four novels, including The Hours (1998), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire and The Paris Review, among others. He has also published a work of nonfiction, Land's End: A Walk Through Provincetown (2002). Born in Cincinnati and raised in Pasadena, California, he currently lives in New York City. James Schiff is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and the author of several books on contemporary American fiction, including John Updike Revisited (1998) and Understanding Reynolds Price (1996). This interview took place in front of an audience on the campus of the University of Cincinnati on March 5, 2002. An Interview with Michael Cunningham/James Schiff Interviewer: The Hours has been terrifically successful. But Tm curious about what you were thinking when you first began that novel. If someone had come up to me and said, "I'm going to rewrite Absalom, Absalom! or War and Peace," I would have said, "Oh, yeah?" Cunningham: I never thought of myself as rewriting Mrs. Dalloway. I would never presume to do something like that. What I wanted to do was more akin to music, to jazz, where a musician will play improvisations on an existing piece of great music from the past—not to reinvent it, not to lay any kind of direct claim to it, but to both honor it and try to make other art out of an existing work of art. To use something that actually exists as the basis of something new, very much the way novelists traditionally use their lives and the lives of people around them as their subjects. I thought ofusing Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as my departure point, as my subject, the way another novelist might use first love or the death of a parent as a subject and a departure point. I originally set out simply to do Mrs. Dalloway in contemporary New York. I wondered what would happen if someone very much like Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway were alive today and free of the constraints that were placed on Clarissa Dalloway in London in the '20s. What if she were set free? Would it be different or ultimately pretty much the same? Would she impose her own restrictions? And I got a certain way into that story, "Mrs. Dalloway Today"—I never called it that; I didn't know what to call it—before I realized what I probably should have realized a lot earlier: that it was just a conceit, really, and not a sufficiently interesting one. Tm conscious of the fact that the world is full of books, more every day, and what you're saying to somebody with a novel is, "Stop what you're doing and read this. Don't read any of the other books, don't have lunch, don't have sex, don't learn French. Read this!" It was an interesting exercise but didn't feel important enough or interesting enough to be making that kind of a claim, and I thought for a few dark The Missouri Review · 113 weeks, Oops! That one didn't work out. Six months of work. I'll just have to discard it and start something new. But I wasn't quite ready to give it up. I started noodling around with it, tried it this way and that way. Very gradually it turned into what it became, this kind of triptych about three different days in the lives of three different women. Interviewer: I read somewhere that you'd started with a male protagonist . Is that character anywhere in the novel, or was he a kind of male Clarissa? Cunningham: There's no real vestige of him in the finished book. He's all gone. You know, these things always seem like good ideas when you're alone in your room. I did want to transpose Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway into the contemporary world, but onto a different gender. I thought I was going to write a novel about a fifty-two-year-old uppermiddle...

Modernism and Mystery: The Curious Case of the Lost Generation

you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. great, hey? It's a feast, Paris. Yes, I said, but it's a sort of moveable feast, isn't it? leaves you with memories so powerful that you can never really forget them. They stay with you forever. --Satterthwait, Masquerade (242) In the passages above, Ernest Hemingway's celebrated metaphor for Paris has traveled from the title page of A Moveable Feast to settle into the dialogue of a contemporary detective novel, Masquerade, by Walter Satterthwait. In the course of the trip, moreover, Ernest Hemingway has been transformed into a fictional character whose words serve to prompt the remark now attributed to the novel's female hero. Of course, Hemingway's seminal story of Paris in the 1920s was written years later in America, and immediate and ongoing questions were raised about its accuracy as memoir. Indeed, by the writer's own prefatory admission, A Moveable Feast is, as its title suggests, uneasily contained within traditional generic boundaries: If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. (1) Similar complexity characterizes the current cultural and literary phenomenon that within the last 15 years has once again led a remarkable number of contemporary American writers to turn their attention to France. A body of work initially dominated by cultural historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists (for example, Richard Bernstein, Robert Daley, Richard Kuisel, Jean-Philippe Mathy) has of late increasingly included the output of essayists (for example, Adam Gopnik, David Sedaris), memoirists (for example, Art Buchwald, Edmund White), and, especially, novelists (for example, Diane Johnson, Claire Messud, Edmund White, Lily King).The contributions of these last mark the emergence of what can be considered a cultural counterpart to a process of globalization that has too frequently been seen as predominantly economic and political in nature. The novels in question also suggest that contemporary American fiction set in France is generally characterized by aspects of postmodern writing (see Durham). That detective novels and mysteries should constitute a distinctive and substantial subcategory of this corpus is in no way surprising; even Peter Mayle, whose best-selling nonfictional books about Provence have helped to create an audience for contemporary English-language texts about France, has lately turned his attention to light-hearted romantic mysteries. The plotlines and characters of what Carolyn Dever and Margaret Cohen see as the most popular genre of the twentieth century frequently appear in mainstream fiction about France as intertextual allusions (23-24; see, for example, Johnson). Moreover, within postmodern theory, the mystery novel or detective story has come to represent an international and hybrid art form, one that transcends both geographic and generic boundaries (see, for example, Collins and Hutcheon). In an introduction to the work of the French novelist Estelle Monbrun, whose own recent examples of the Franco-American polar (detective novel) traverse national and aesthetic boundaries, Pierre Verdaguer stresses the thematic and stylistic flexibility of the form: It allows every kind of and can sometimes support the juxtaposition of cultural registers usually deemed incompatible (356). Within the mixture of recent American detective novels about France--which include Cara Black's new series of murder mysteries set in 1993-94 in different quartiers of Paris and Sarah Smith's trilogy of historical mysteries set in America and France in the first decade of the twentieth century--I want to focus on a group of three texts whose similarities cannot be attributed to the particular vision of a single author. …

Reading William Kennedy (review)

In Reading William Kennedy, Michael Patrick Gillespie adds to a small but growing body of literary criticism of contemporary novelist William Kennedy, the Albany-born writer made famous by his 1983 novel, Ironweed, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Kennedy's place in contemporary American fiction has been most firmly established by his "Albany cycle," a collection of independent but integrated novels centered around his hometown of Albany, New York. As Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha County, Kennedy creates an extended fictionalized history for his Albany, and he weaves his interconnecting plots and recurring characters—most famously, his street tough and politically savvy Irishmen—throughout seven novels, including the recently released Roscoe.

Metaphors and Paranoia: Two Approaches to Contemporary American Fiction

The books reviewed in this essay examine authors whose formal innovations are as intriguing as the ways their fictions respond to the conditions of their production. To say that Saltzman focuses more on stylistic innovations and Melley more on socio-historical conditions risks reducing one to "form" and the other to "content." Though such a statement would be an oversimplification, it would be fair to say that Melley and Saltzman are complimentary opposites who, taken together, offer keen (if contrary) analyses of the ways in which—to paraphrase Saltzman—words render the worlds of contemporary American fiction.

Bodies in Waiting: Representations of Medical Waiting Rooms in Contemporary American Fiction

In interrogating the assumptions associated with the nor- mal body, critics working in the relatively new field of disability studies have problematized conceptions of the body that con- struct it as a seamless, unfragmented whole mirroring and guar- anteeing individual autonomy. The need to regulate and contain the disabled body, Lennard Davis argues in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995), results in a tendency to divide bodies into two categories: whole and incom- plete, abled and disabled, normal and abnormal, functional and dysfunctional (129). I argue that the medical waiting room pro- vides a space in which the seemingly immutable cultural cate- gories Davis describes are fraught, contested, or blurred. As it assigns its inhabitants a body that is symbolically—and often biologically—impaired, the waiting room threatens the mobility and mortality of the living-moving body. 1 If our culture defines the body as a malleable extension of subjectivity and polices the public presentation of bodies to obscure signs of potential differ- ence, the medical waiting room represents a rare space of public display for the otherwise private fact of illness or imminent death. 2 By revealing the body in the context of its imperilment by mortality, the waiting room also exposes its inhabitants to what Julia Kristeva describes as the threat of the abject, of death in- fecting life. The medical waiting room uncovers the body's vul- nerability to illness and injury along a continuum that ranges from the physical—the amputated leg of a diabetic or the visible tremors of a patient's hand—to the symbolic—the threat of serious illness that shadows even the most routine mammogram or colonoscopy. My interest in the medical waiting room, then, results in part from

New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction

Book Review| January 01 2002 New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction, Gilbert H. Muller. Lorraine Dong Lorraine Dong Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2002) 21 (2): 99–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502819 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lorraine Dong; New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2002; 21 (2): 99–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27502819 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2002 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This Mad 'Instead': Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

This Mad 'Instead': Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

This Mad 'Instead': Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction

This Mad 'Instead': Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction

Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction Since 1970

Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction Since 1970

Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism

Eschewing allegiance to particular literary movements, Robert Rebein offers a shrewd topographical map of contemporary American fiction. Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature. Concentrating on the realist bent and regional orientation in contemporary fiction, he discusses in detail the various names by which this fiction has been described, including literary post-modemism, minimalism, Hick Chic, Dirty Realism, ecofeminism, and more. Rebein's clearly written, nuanced inter-pretations of works by Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Kingsolver, E. Annie Proulx, Chris Offutt, and others will appeal to a wide range of readers.

Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction (review)

Slethaug introduces his book with a bold, and arguable, statement: "It is surely chaos theory that can help to explore, if not entirely explain, the mysterious and complex in narration, culture, and life." Over the past two decades, several works have demonstrated the ways in which various physical theories can bear on language and text; the value of Slethaug's book lies in its being the first to examine a range of contemporary American fiction--by Michael Crichton, Carol Shields, Robert Stone, and others--through the lens of chaos theory. His preface provides a lucid introduction to orderly and dynamic systems that allows the reader unschooled in chaos theory to engage his argument. He surveys all the critical processes around which his ensuing nine chapters are organized: entropy, stochastics, feedback loops, bifurcation, flow, dynamic theory, and strange attractors. Focusing each chapter on discrete aspects of chaos theory permits Slethaug to show the multifarious ways that different facets of the theory can highlight different parts of, in many cases, the same text. He returns to John Barth's On With the Story, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Don DeLillo's White Noise repeatedly in several chapters.