Postwar American Fiction Research Articles

Bryan M. Santin. Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 290. $99.99 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBryan M. Santin. Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 290. $99.99 (cloth).Brian DanoffBrian DanoffMiami University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 11, Number 4Fall 2022 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722113 Views: 30Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Helen Garner’s Education

On the 14th of December 1972, a schoolteacher named Helen Garner found herself fired. This essay argues that the terms of Garner’s firing inform the countercultural realism of her first novel Monkey Grip (1977), which is unabashedly fluent in, and indeed narratively yearns for, various forms of the four-letter contraband that got her sacked in the first place. I go on to show how her subsequent hiring by various universities in a succession of writer-in-residencies left related yet distinct marks on her taut minimalist masterpiece, The Children’s Bach (1984). My claim is that Garner’s firing therefore ironically heralds the belated emergence of a period of Australian literary history in which the new diversity of literary fiction cannot be fully comprehended, as Mark McGurl argues in his seminal study of postwar American fiction The Program Era (2009), without close attention ‘to the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and the practices of higher education’ (ix).

Squatter Regionalism: Postwar Fiction, Geography, and the Program Era

In this article we use computational methods to establish that the Program Era has altered the traditional understanding that a regionalist writer writes about the region in which they grew up. Using the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an example, we prove that many writers now write about the region to which they moved to study and/or teach creative writing. Using a database of demographic information about faculty and students alongside computational analysis of place names in a curated corpus of work produced by prominent Iowa-affiliated writers, we map authorial career itineraries onto the geographic locations referenced in their fiction, visualizing the ways in which the relationship between writer and place has been inflected by the Midwestern location of the Workshop. We found that Iowa references are significantly higher than in a comparable corpus of postwar literature. They are also significantly higher in percentage terms than Iowa’s population as a proportion of the US population. Finally, we found that the works in our corpus most centrally focused on Iowa are, overwhelmingly, not authored by Iowa natives. Instead, we have identified a cohort of squatter regionalists, authors whose writings prominently feature the state in which they received their MFA, found faculty employment, or (frequently) both. This trend, we believe, may also be evident in works by authors from other MFA programs, which would confirm our larger hypothesis that the professional itineraries mandated by the Program Era have influenced the regional settings of postwar American fiction.

The Loss of Self and Identity Crisis in Jewish American Literature: The Case of Bernard Malamud’s The German Refugee

The search for identity and self-identity problems have been one of the pivotal themes for Jewish American authors. Prominent writers such as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth explore American Jewish identity and address the questions of assimilation, the hardship of immigrant life, challenges of cultural acceptance, and finding purpose in life. In particular they are concerned with the self-identification and alienation of American Jewry. The given paper examines the problems of personality crisis and loss of identity portrayed in Bernard Malamud’s story “The German Refugee”. The psychological aspects of the main character’s personality are investigated, an attempt is made to analyze the factors that determined the crisis, which ultimately led him to suicide. The author also touches upon the topic of the post-Holocaust consciousness in Jewish American literature. Despite the fact that Malamud did not address the Holocaust theme in his works directly, he, like many post-war American fiction writers, was deeply impacted by it. The importance of Malamud's writing for Holocaust literature lies in his realistic portrayal of how the Shoah continues to affect survivors, refugees and those Jews who were not physically affected by it.

Homo Trumpiens: Ben Lerner's The Topeka School

Homo Trumpiens:Ben Lerner's The Topeka School Christian Lorentzen (bio) It's tempting when considering the last thirty years of American fiction to adopt the speculative framework proposed by David Foster Wallace in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" and extend it to the present. The dominant mode among the young writers of his generation—Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Leyner, and A. M. Homes, among others: what some were then calling "post-postmodernism"—was in his view flat, numb, cynical, saturated in pop imagery, an analog to the "tele-visual attitude," a form of rebellion against structures of authority whose meanings it had tired of even bothering to examine. The style was a sign of exhaustion, fiction devolved to mere stand-up comedy in prose. Wallace predicted the next rebels would be "anti-rebels" who endorsed "single-entendre values" instead of irony, self-consciousness, and fatigue. They would treat "old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction." They would be sincere. [End Page 779] The sincere turn did arrive, though not exactly as Wallace predicted. It didn't do away with cynicism so much as set it up as an ogre to be defeated, as in the dystopian rescue narratives of George Saunders's stories. It didn't do away with pop imagery so much as valorize it, as in the superhero bildungsromans of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon. And it didn't conjure new sources of reverence so much as locate them in the tragedies of the past and then sentimentalize them, as in the third-generation Holocaust narratives of Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss (and again Chabon). If authority was still suspect under George W. Bush, at least the end of history was over, and a sense of American innocence had been regained after 9/11, the attacks that launched a thousand novels. But if sincerity had to be buttressed by surrealism, superheroes, ahistorical improvisations, and artificial innocence, how sincere was it really? Soon enough there was Obama, who represented a restoration of the sort of authority American writers could revere, perhaps even identify with. There followed a turn to the authentic. Various strategies emerged among novelists, but none has drawn the critical heat directed at autofiction—a term that originated in French in the 1970s and in English has been applied largely to what the Germans call Künstlerromans, "artist's novels" that dramatize the author's formation and inscribe the creation of the novel on the book itself. Writers like Sheila Heti (a Canadian), Tao Lin, Jenny Offill, Teju Cole, and Elif Batuman have drawn on energies that had veered into the memoir, taken recourse to the diaristic and the essayistic, and deployed alter egos easily blurred with their authors. None of these strategies are exactly new, but they represent a departure from the dominant strain of realism, if not a drastic one. The novels of Ben Lerner are worth scrutinizing with Wallace's predictions in mind. He is less an anti-rebel or anti-anti-rebel than a writer who has arrived at a truce between irony and sincerity by decoupling self-consciousness from cynicism. It's no accident that [End Page 780] postwar American fiction and television don't loom as the determining influences on his novels, as they did for Wallace and his cohort in a way that seemed inescapable at the time. Lerner's lodestars are the poetry of Walt Whitman and John Ashbery, visual art, and the classic European novel. His trilogy of autofictions—Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and his new book The Topeka School—examine the writer's progress: from anxieties of fraudulence, to the compromises of mastery, and now the retrospective project of locating the genesis of the writer's calling. The governing concept of The Topeka School is the "man-child," and you could call the three books Lerner's Man-Child Trilogy. In an essay on Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lerner applied Baudelaire's definition of the man-child to the Norwegian: "a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge...

In the File Drawer Labeled ‘Science Fiction’: Genre after the Age of the Novel

In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut famously complained of being labeled a sci ence-fiction writer, but he also predicted that so-called science fiction would become mainstream as more writers incorporated the effects of technology into their literary fiction. By the time of his death in 2007, the “subliterary” genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and a combination of the three presented under the banner of children`s literature dominated the literary marketplace. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the continuing expansion of capital has, perhaps indirectly, affected the liter ary marketplace by demanding greater and greater levels of commodifica tion. Genres are, in many respects, marketing labels, and the need to slot fiction into recognizable market niches undoubtedly drives much of the publishing industry. However, even at the formal level, the commodifica tion of forms has tended to uproot the “literary” in the literary market place. As that market has become more global, genre fiction predomi nates. Using Vonnegut as a point of departure, Tally argues that the ambi tions of “literary” writers of postwar American fiction increasingly turned to generic forms since the 1970s. The celebrated hybrid genres today might be considered as literary versions of financial derivatives, drawing their “value” from other commodities, and Tally suggests that such fiction reflects the postnational world market after the “age of the novel.”

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2016 Mike Witcombe (bio) What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2016, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (2016). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author's last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in "Book Chapters" and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth's texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. Mike Witcombe Mike Witcombe is Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University, where he researches contemporary Jewish-American fiction. He is currently co-editing an essay collection for the Open Library of the Humanities titled "New Voices in Jewish-American Fiction," and has additional research interests in baseball fiction, videogames, and the history of psychoanalysis. His article on Roth's drafting process for the Kepesh novels was published in Philip Roth Studies 13.1 (Spring 2017). BOOKS McDonald, Paul and Samantha Roden. Philip Roth Through the Lens of Kepesh. Humanities-Ebooks, 2016. Google Scholar EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Gooblar, David and Aimee Pozorski, editors. Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination, Lexington Books, 2016. Google Scholar EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Gooblar, David and Aimee Pozorski, editors. Roth After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination, Lexington Books, 2016. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Brauner, David. "Performance Anxiety: Impotence, Queerness, and the 'Drama of Self-Disgust' in Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire and The Humbling." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 61-78. Google Scholar Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska. "'A Human Being Lives Here': Philip Roth on Scandals and the American Presidency." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 29–42. Google Scholar Calder, Alex. "'I told my wrath, my Roth did grow': Anger in Operation Shylock." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 95–108. [End Page 133] Google Scholar Coughlan, David. "Exit Ghost Writer: Philip Roth." Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 97–114. Google Scholar Douglas, Christopher. "Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America." If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right, Cornell UP, 2016, pp. 117–50. Google Scholar Gelbart, Amy. "'[Sticking] to a plan completely": Performance, Affective Adaptation, Memory, Pretend Play, and Suicide in Philip Roth's The Humbling." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 149–66. Google Scholar George, Joseph. "Assimilation and Appropriation: Contest and Collaboration in Global Suburbia." Postmodern Suburban Spaces: Philosophy, Ethics, and Community in Post-War American Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 163–80. Google Scholar Guillain, Aurélie. "Stalkers, Furies and Comforters: Roth's Grave Comedy of Persecution." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 79–94. Google Scholar Hayes, Patrick. "'With an accomplice no less brilliant than Jean Genet': A Comparative Approach to Roth's Autofiction." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 43–60. Google Scholar Mack, Michael. "Ageing and Modern Jewish Writing and Thought." The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging, edited by Geoffrey Scarre, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 149–67. Google Scholar Morley, Catherine. "'My Kinsmen, My Precursors': Philip Roth, Epic, Influence, and Bardic Proclivities." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 109–26. Google Scholar Nadel, Ira. "Roth @ 25: Publishing Goodbye, Columbus." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 19–28. Google Scholar Newton, Adam Zachary. "'I was the prosthesis': Roth and Late Style." Gooblar and Pozorski pp. 127–48. Google Scholar Parks, Tim. "Philip Roth." Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations Between Them. Yale UP, 2016. yale.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.12987/yale/9780300215366.001.0001/upso-9780300215366-chapter-009 Google Scholar Pozorski, Aimee. "Introduction—After Eighty: Philip Roth and the American Literary Imagination." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. xiii-xxii. Google Scholar Shechner, Mark. "Newark: The Shtetl." Gooblar and Pozorski, pp. 167–80. Google Scholar Shostak, Debra. "'Every...

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015 Compiled by Mike Witcombe What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. BOOKS The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Basu, Ann. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Koy, Christopher E., Ed. “The Worldliness of Philip Roth.” Special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 25:49 (2015). Print. BOOK CHAPTERS Aarons, Vicki. “The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. [End Page 111] Batnitzky, Leora. “Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis.” The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Eds. Leora Batnitzky and Ilona Pardes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. 213-24. Print. Budick, Emily Miller. “Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me.” The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. 19-36. Print. Furst, Lilian R. “Ritualized Bellyaching: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.” Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. 57-70. Print. Löffler, Philipp. “‘A Singular Act of Invention’: Storytelling, Pluralism, and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy.” Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. 97-126. Print. Mosher, Paul W. and Jeffrey Berman. “Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 82-104. Print. _______. “The Angry Act: The Psychoanalyst’s Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 63-81. Print. Osmanović, Sabina. “Dealing with Evanescence: The Motif of Old Age and the Crisis of Meaning in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.” Mapping the World of Anglo-American Studies at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. 175-81. Print. Pozorski, Aimee. “American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History After 9/11.” Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Eds. John Duvall and Robert Marzec. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 168-93. Print. Schreier, Benjamin. “Why Jews Aren’t Normal: The Unrepresentable Future of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York UP, 2015. 149-84. Print. Segal, Lynne. “The Circus of (male) Ageing: Philip Roth and the Perils of Masculinity.” Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism. Ed. Stephen Frosh. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 87-104. Print. Tandon, Bharat. “Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing.” Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical. Ed. Fiona Green. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Web. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Anténe, Petr. “Racial Conflicts in the Campus Novel of the Early 2000s: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and...

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”: The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld Philipp Löeffler (bio) Critics like to speak in superlatives when they measure the impact of Don DeLillo on postwar American fiction, but there is considerable disagreement about the precise nature of his greatness.1 According to John Duvall, DeLillo is “one of the most important American novelists since 1970” because of “his fiction’s repeated invitation to think historically.”2 Duvall’s assessment is a viable starting point, because however central Don DeLillo’s work really is, it no doubt reflects an almost obsessive interest in the history of the postwar decades. DeLillo’s novels are all—in some way or another—focused on the extent to which the Cold War has shaped American culture in ways that are not documented in official, textbook versions of the twentieth century. His novels remind us constantly to think beyond the confines of the ordinary and to look at those figures that often evade the frameworks of historiography proper. And yet the point of DeLillo’s fiction is not mainly to envision alternative plots and speculative counterhistories that would oppose more traditional accounts of the postwar era. That would be a traditional postmodernist agenda, asking what we can or cannot know about history. For DeLillo, American history is relevant as a very practical archive of stories that people need to get a grip on their own lives—here and now—and not primarily as a field of epistemological inquiry or skepticism. In this article, I plan to discuss this shift in focus—from history understood as an epistemological object to history understood as a site of memory—in the context of DeLillo’s much acclaimed novel Underworld (1997). The novel celebrates individual moments of commemoration as a legitimate and reliable form of historical sense-making and thus provides a contrast to more traditional versions of postmodernist historiographic metafiction. As readers of Underworld delve into the worlds of the postwar decades, they learn about the uses rather than the truth of history that such literary encounters enable. That is to say, readers learn that how we perceive a series of historical events [End Page 91] is conditioned by the ways we conceptualize them within a coherent narrative. DeLillo seems to be suggesting that we need such narratives to stabilize our individual life worlds, rather than to find out about what really happened at a particular point in time. This is why for DeLillo the Cold War period is integral as a cultural reference frame: not because we need additional knowledge about the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John. F. Kennedy, or Watergate, but because the Cold War period itself sparked the coevolution of a historical vocabulary that allowed people in the postwar decades to know what they believed in and what their stories about life in America meant. Hence, my argument will be that Underworld is a novel dedicated not exclusively to crucial events of the Cold War decades but also to the mechanisms of storytelling and a corresponding belief system that helped people to define themselves meaningfully as historical subjects. The second claim I want to make pertains to the problem of storytelling and how Underworld appropriates the history of postwar American baseball, more particularly the history of the Dodgers versus Giants series in October 1951. Many critics read DeLillo’s baseball obsession as just another moment of allegorizing the Cold War decades, famously suggested by the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in John Drebinger’s article for the New York Times.3 But the incorporation of baseball into the novel goes way beyond mere allegorical symbolism. The cultural logic of baseball is inextricably entwined with Underworld’s theoretical commitment to a memory discourse in which the subjectivity of individual experiences supplants the authority of “objective” history, as it were. Like baseball, history depends on sudden and often unpredictable turns of events. Such events evade traditional analytical categories and become meaningful only through their incorporation into the story worlds of very personal lives. This is how they are endowed with meaning and reliability no matter how implausible their...

The letters of William Gaddis

Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922-98), author of The Recognitions and J R, shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation: an intimate look at one of the great literary minds of the 20th century.

'This is our Armageddon’: Berlin in Postwar American Fiction

Este articulo explora las respuestas dadas desde la literatura estadounidense a losbombardeos aliados de la que era entonces la cuarta ciudad mas grande del mundo: Berlin. En la historia reciente, ninguna ciudad europea habia sufrido semejante devastacion, ni habia sido tan fotografiada. En este articulo se abordan tecnicas como los cambios del punto de vista, la complejidad gramatical y las metaforas empleadas para describir la cualidad mitica de la destruccion de Berlin, asi como los intentos casi mitificadores de levantar con los textos monumentos de la destruccion misma, desde los anos inmediatamente posteriores a la guerra hasta el siglo XXI.AbstractThis article surveys American literary responses to the U.S. bombing of the world’s then-fourth largest metropolis, Berlin. Such total devastation of a European city had never been seen before in recent history, and had never been so extensively recorded by photography. Discussed in the article are techniques of shifting viewpoints, of grammatical complexity and metaphors used to describe the mythic quality of Berlin’s destruction, and the almost mythicizing attempts to make textual monuments of destruction itself, from the immediate postwar years into the twenty-first century.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2011

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2021 Brittany Hirth (bio) The following is a bibliography of philip roth-related texts published during 2021 including books, book chapters, journal articles, and a miscellaneous section that contains a sampling of notable magazine articles. Individual essays included in books not solely centered on Roth are grouped in "Book Chapters" and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook readers, are not included in this listing, but they can be easily accessed online. [End Page 99] Brittany Hirth Brittany Hirth is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Arts and Letters at Dickinson State University, where she teaches twentieth-century and contemporary American literature. She has published articles on Jewish American literature and war representation. She most recently published an article on Philip Roth in the Cambridge University Press essay collection Philip Roth in Context. BOOKS Bailey, Blake. Philip Roth: The Biography. W.W. Norton, 2021. Google Scholar Berlinerblau, Jacques. The Philip Roth We Don't Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography. U of Virginia P, 2021. Google Scholar Huimin, Xin. A Study of the Writing of the Memories in Philip Roth's Fiction. Science P, 2021. Google Scholar Nadel, Ira. Philip Roth: A Counterlife. Oxford UP, 2021. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Aarons, Victoria. "The Late Novellas." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 111-20. Google Scholar Anderson, Daniel. "The Berkshires." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 132-40. Google Scholar Berlinerblau, Jacques. "Judaism and Secularism." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 215-29. Google Scholar Bloom, James D. "Writing about Writing." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 48-57. Google Scholar Brauner, David. "Roth and Sexuality." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 287-97. Google Scholar Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska. "Prague." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 141-49. Google Scholar Canales, Gustavo Sánchez. "Antisemitism." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 241-51. Google Scholar Chevereşan, Cristina. "'This Story Isn't Us': Pseudo-Detectives and Speculative Story-Telling in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer." Towards a Theory of Whodunits: Murder Rewritten, edited by Dana Percec, Cambridge Scholars, 2021, pp. 139-52. Google Scholar Connolly, Andy. "Class Politics." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 311-22. Google Scholar Dean, Andrew. "Ghosts: Philip Roth and Ethnic Writing." Metafiction and the Postwar Novel: Foes, Ghosts, and Faces in the Water, Oxford UP, 2021, pp. 116-68. Google Scholar Esteve, Mary. "The Art, Sociology, and Library Politics of Happiness in Early Philip Roth." Incremental Realism: Postwar American Fiction, Happiness, and Welfare-State Liberalism, Stanford UP, 2021, pp. 30-56. Google Scholar Flanzbaum, Hilene. "Roth and the Holocaust." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 230-40. Google Scholar Glaser, Jennifer. "Roth as a 'Jewish American Writer.'" Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 205-14. Google Scholar Glăvan, Gabriela. "Mystery as Tragedy: Philip Roth's Nemesis." Towards a Theory of Whodunits: Murder Rewritten, edited by Dana Percec, Cambridge Scholars, 2021, pp. 153-64. Google Scholar Gooblar, David. "Political Satire." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 301-10. Google Scholar Hadar, David. "The Zuckerman Books." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 81-90. Google Scholar Hirth, Brittany. "American Individualism." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 323-32. Google Scholar Ivanova, Velichka. "Roth in Translation." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 360-71. Google Scholar Jaffe, Miriam. "Narrative Medicine." Philip Roth in Context, edited by Maggie McKinley, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 194-202. Google Scholar Kalisch, Michael. "'The Love Alternative': Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000)." The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction, Manchester...

Brier, Evan. 2010. ANovel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction

Brier, Evan. 2010. A<i>Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction</i>

A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction

A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction

A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. By Evan Brier. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 200 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4207-2.)

This book explores the cultural situation of postwar American fiction by examining Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956). The spread of mass culture, Evan Brier argues, required authors and publishers to reposition the novel as a genre that asserted the separateness of art from commerce while enabling them to exploit new marketing opportunities. Each of Brier's examples involves a version of that paradox. Bowles bypassed his William Morris Agency agent, Helen Strauss, by taking his manuscript to James Laughlin at the New Directions Publishing Corporation. But, to sell the book, Laughlin cannily mobilized Tennessee Williams's review praising Bowles's anticareerism. Thus distance from a mass audience became the basis for courting it. Bradbury's characters lament the existence of too many readers, yet the publisher Ian Ballantine enlarged Bradbury's public with a paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451. By endorsing a title change, Wilson's publisher Richard Simon obscured the rebellion against conformity that Wilson actually depicted but Wilson himself capitulated to corporate demands. Peyton Place resembled a prewar best seller more than later blockbusters because the advertising executive Aaron Sussman promoted it the way he had earlier sold James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).

A novel marketplace: mass culture, the book trade, and postwar American fiction

Introduction: Selling the Novel in the Age of Mass Culture Chapter 1. Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: The Making and Marketing of The Sheltering Sky Chapter 2. The Incalculable Value of Reading: Fahrenheit 451 and the Paperback Assault on Mass Culture Chapter 3. Synergy and the Novelist: Simon & Schuster Time, Inc. and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Chapter 4. From Novel to Blockbuster: Peyton Place and the Narrative of Cultural Decline Chapter 5. 1959 and Beyond: Mergers, Acquisitions, and Norman Mailer Epilogue: Novels Today: Oprah Winfrey, Jonathan Franzen, and the Long Tail Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments

The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo (review)

Reviewed by: The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo Joseph Dewey Stephanie S. Halldorson. The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007. 223 pp. $79.95. Tuning in to cnn, I happened to catch the story of a middle-school kid in the Midwest who was riding his usual bus home when he noticed the driver had slumped over the wheel Thinking quickly, the youngster commandeered the wheel and, with the help of a friend who worked the brake, pulled the bus off the road to safety, cnn had dubbed the kids “School Bus Heroes.” Heroes? It is not to diminish the kids’ gutsy actions, but when it comes to heroes, contemporary American culture suffers from an embarrassment of riches. Like other terms that once held privilege and gravitas in the American imagination—like “visionary,” “soul,” “prophet”—the word “hero” has been so widely (mis)appropriated as to have become devaluated, even [End Page 254] diminished. Twenty-four-hour news channels routinely elevate cancer researchers, firefighters, soldiers in harm’s way, missionaries in remote postings among the poor and diseased, muckraking journalists, patients who overcome disabilities, celebrities who raise money for disaster victims, athletes who make late-game plays, convenience store clerks who thwart late-night burglaries, and, well, two kids who pull over a school bus—it goes on and on. Far more disturbing, of course, is the suasive power of fantasy heroes. For those under, say, twenty, heroes exist in an entirely symbolic landscape, in pretentious graphic novels (read: comic books), cheesy summer action flicks, multi-volume fantasy epics, animated movies, and, supremely, video games. We begin to lose the dimension of the authentic hero, that rare iconic figure, subtle and nuanced, able to give voice and direction to a culture’s evolution, to embody a people’s greatest aspirations and its noblest failures. Of course, what has noticeably given way in any discussion of heroes in the last generation or two is the privileged position literature once held and its role in the American experiment to define the distinctly American hero. Books? Unless they are set in alternative universes with enchanted unicorns and magic stones, books ... well, in these latter days of the Age of Reading, being a good reader has the same quaint nostalgia of being, say, a good butter churner. But before we eulogize literature and surrender to the coaxing pull and easy argument of image technologies, you might pause to consider, indeed relish, the breadth and reach of the implications of Stephanie S. Halldorson’s probing study, a striking reminder that contemporary American literature, seriously conceived and passionately committed to its cultural moment, can still, even in these dreary post-post-whatever-we’re-in era, rise to the occasion, can still define for its era the parameters of its highest aspiration, and can still engage without simplification the implications of the American endeavour even as it is being played out, reclaiming the grandeur of the kind of heroes who, unlike the faux-heroes that pop up seasonally at the Cineplex or daily on cnn, are subtle, nuanced, provocative, and who invite us to engage our cultural moment and the implications of where we all stand, characters who prick us, intrigue and perplex us. Halldorson reminds us early on that Pynchoris shabby schlemiel, which has become the dominant manifestation of contemporary American literary heroes, need not be the last word. We are, as it turns out, better than that. Contemporary heroes, in an intricate dynamic with those legions of non-heroes, struggle with their identity in an endless process of definition and redefinition (unlike ancient heroes who undertook a single grand journey); they defy the status quo, asserting [End Page 255] both intellect and heart amid and against their vacuous culture of ashes and shadows, images and surfaces. For scholars of postwar American fiction, Halldorson’s study rescues two towering figures from their own critical legacy. Saul Bellow has become decidedly old school, unjustly marginalized amid the hip academic excesses routinely lavished on much lesser novelists who...

The Children of 1965: Allegory, Postmodernism, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri was already a celebrated author when her first novel appeared in print. Her short story of Maladies was selected for O. Henry Prize and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Her book of collected stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won Pulitzer Prize in literature. And in following year, The New Yorker named her one of 20 most important young American writers of new century. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Namesake attracted widespread press coverage. Reviewers foregrounded novel's mastery of form, focused on specific moments in text when author's skills were clearly in evidence, and compared her favorably to other contemporary authors who seemed, in contrast, overly self-indulgent (Kakutani, Kipen, Metcalf, Caldwell). If reviewers were in agreement about Lahiri's abilities as a writer, however, their enthusiasm about originality of her storytelling was more muted. David Kipen observed: Theme-wise, The Namesake marks no special advance over Interpreter of Maladies. It's a novel about an immigrant family's imperfect assimilation into America.... A certain sameness begins to creep in midway through book--explicable, if not completely excusable, as its picaresque hero's compulsion to trace same neurotic patterns over and over. In many ways, ordinary nature of The Namesake's narrative distances it from other novels, which tend, as Mark McGurl has recently argued, to combine the routine operations of modernist autopoetics with a rhetorical performance of cultural group membership preeminently, though by no means exclusively, marked as ethnic (117). By autopoetics, McGurl refers to reflexivity found in experimentation of highly esteemed contemporary fiction; this reflexivity is not so much a radical break from modernism as it is continuing interest of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research (111). The combination, then, of an intense focus on form with a preoccupation with leads to a cultural (117)--a phrase that describes an impressive array of authors from Jews like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to Native Americans like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich; Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-rae Lee; Chicanas like Sandra Cisneros; and African Americans like Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison. More impressive still, authors who don't have same claim to as these do nevertheless organize their work as if they were writing novels, minoritizing lower middle class (Raymond Carver), Vietnam War veterans (Tim O'Brien), Southern culture (Flannery O'Conner), and even white techno-nerds (Neal Stephenson). Far from thinking of postmodern fiction and novel as dividing literary field (120), a focus on high cultural pluralism suggests that postmodern is intimately related to what late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously denounced as a cult of ethnicity (41). (1) If so, what are we to make of a novel like The Namesake, which clearly combines an intense awareness of its own form (which reviewers quickly picked up in their celebration of author's craft) with a definite marking, but does so without experimentation--nor angst such experimentation routinely gives expression to--that we have come to recognize as indicative of serious postwar American fiction? In response to this question, I wish to suggest that a generational shift in perspective has taken place. The cultural landscape that confronted an earlier cohort of pioneering high cultural postwar novelists required hard work to make imaginable phenomena we have come to group under capacious and aging sign of postmodernism; these are phenomena like accelerated time/space compression of late capitalism, feverish self-fashioning of individuality that is wholly consonant with consumerism such capitalism relies on, hypermobility of populations within and across borders of various kinds, and dominance of biopolitics and its intertwining with geopolitics. …

The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American FictionMark McGurlMark McGurl Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 32, Number 1Autumn 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/498006 Views: 328Total views on this site Citations: 19Citations are reported from Crossref ©2005 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anna McFarlane Stephenson, Neal, (Mar 2022): 1–6.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119431732.ecaf0220José Manuel Mora-Fandos, Christelle Schreiber-Di Cesare Aportaciones de la retórica a la escritura creativa en cuanto disciplina docente universitaria: una propuesta, Arbor 196, no.798798 (Dec 2020): a580.https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2020.798n4004Eric Hayot Literary History after Literary Dominance, Modern Language Quarterly 80, no.44 (Dec 2019): 479–494.https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7777832Michael F. Miller Stan Brakhage’s Autopsy: The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Journal of Film and Video 70, no.22 (Jul 2018): 46–55.https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.70.2.0046Meg King “Where is your country?”: Locating White Masculinity in All the Pretty Horses, The Cormac McCarthy Journal 12, no.11 (Jan 2014): 69–88.https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0069 Theorizing Expectations, (Jan 2013): 29–58.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-002 The Trope of the Lost Manuscript, (Jan 2013): 59–80.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-003 Not Ethnic Literature, (Jan 2013): 81–103.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-004 American Personhood, (Jan 2013): 104–123.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-005 Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race, (Jan 2013): 127–151.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-006 Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction, (Jan 2013): 152–178.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-007 Becoming Planetary, (Jan 2013): 179–196.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-008 Desert-Orient-Nomad, (Jan 2013): 197–219.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-009 Conclusion, (Jan 2013): 220–237.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-010 Notes, (Jan 2013): 245–260.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-011 Works Cited, (Jan 2013): 261–270.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-012Andrew Hoberek Postmodernist Fiction, (Dec 2010).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444337822.wbetcfv2p008Olivia Banner “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation”: Interrogating the Genetic Discourse of Sex Variation with Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Banner, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no.44 (Jul 2015): 843–867.https://doi.org/10.1086/651038Loren Glass Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the minnesota review 2009, no.71-7271-72 (May 2009): 256–268.https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2009-71-72-256

The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American FictionMark McGurlMark McGurl Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 32, Number 1Autumn 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/498006 Views: 345Total views on this site Citations: 19Citations are reported from Crossref ©2005 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anna McFarlane Stephenson, Neal, (Mar 2022): 1–6.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119431732.ecaf0220José Manuel Mora-Fandos, Christelle Schreiber-Di Cesare Aportaciones de la retórica a la escritura creativa en cuanto disciplina docente universitaria: una propuesta, Arbor 196, no.798798 (Dec 2020): a580.https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2020.798n4004Eric Hayot Literary History after Literary Dominance, Modern Language Quarterly 80, no.44 (Dec 2019): 479–494.https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7777832Michael F. Miller Stan Brakhage’s Autopsy: The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Journal of Film and Video 70, no.22 (Jul 2018): 46–55.https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.70.2.0046Meg King “Where is your country?”: Locating White Masculinity in All the Pretty Horses, The Cormac McCarthy Journal 12, no.11 (Jan 2014): 69–88.https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.12.1.0069 Theorizing Expectations, (Jan 2013): 29–58.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-002 The Trope of the Lost Manuscript, (Jan 2013): 59–80.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-003 Not Ethnic Literature, (Jan 2013): 81–103.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-004 American Personhood, (Jan 2013): 104–123.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-005 Comics and the Changing Meaning of Race, (Jan 2013): 127–151.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-006 Allegory and the Child in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction, (Jan 2013): 152–178.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-007 Becoming Planetary, (Jan 2013): 179–196.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-008 Desert-Orient-Nomad, (Jan 2013): 197–219.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-009 Conclusion, (Jan 2013): 220–237.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-010 Notes, (Jan 2013): 245–260.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-011 Works Cited, (Jan 2013): 261–270.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378945-012Andrew Hoberek Postmodernist Fiction, (Dec 2010).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444337822.wbetcfv2p008Olivia Banner “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation”: Interrogating the Genetic Discourse of Sex Variation with Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Banner, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no.44 (Jul 2015): 843–867.https://doi.org/10.1086/651038Loren Glass Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the minnesota review 2009, no.71-7271-72 (May 2009): 256–268.https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2009-71-72-256