Postmodern American Fiction Research Articles

The ‘Problem’ of Beckett in postmodern American fiction

ABSTRACT Despite having vanished from the epicentre of Beckett Studies, the modern/postmodern debate remains unsettled ground. Drawing from Beckett’s historical unwillingness to fall neatly within these markers, this article investigates Beckett’s legacy over the fiction and essays of John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Privileging Beckett as a generative ‘problem’, Barthelme’s category will be used to illustrate Beckett’s legacy as one that is both resisted and accommodated by postmodern authors. In this regard, Barthelme conceives of his works as written ‘in opposition’ to Beckett, while appropriating his aesthetic commitment to ‘not knowing’. This is supplemented by a discussion of Barth, in whose works we find a ‘shore’ erected against the ruins of Beckettian ‘silence’. Underwriting the ‘problem’ discussed in this article, we will also examine the contradictory models of legacy embodied in Beckett’s writing; in particular, the Texts for Nothing, (1955) following the impasse of The Unnamable, (1953) find Beckett forging a nominally post-Beckett voice in the space of his own corpus. Simultaneously engaging with and disavowing Beckett’s influence, Barth and Barthelme interrogate the shape of Beckett’s postmodern legacy, finding in Beckett’s works both the threat of ending and the promise of creative renewal.

Owning the end of the world: Zero K and DeLillo’s post-postmodern mutation

ABSTRACTDon DeLillo often has been un-problematically designated as a second-generation postmodernist, with his most prominent novels seemingly affirming his place within the canon of postmodern American fiction. “Owning the End of the World” troubles this commonplace, mapping out the works of “late period” DeLillo, most importantly Zero K, in order to reveal the complex evolution of DeLillo’s more recent work. This essay situates DeLillo’s treatment of the human condition in Zero K as a superficial companion and spiritual counter to White Noise, underscoring DeLillo’s turn away from a postmodern outlook and to a more post-postmodern stance gaining traction in the twenty-first century.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2017

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2017 Mike Witcombe (bio) What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2017, 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 has recently coedited an open access 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. BOOKS Baum, Devorah. Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone). Yale UP, 2017. Google Scholar Connolly, Andy. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Google Scholar EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska and Lee Trepanier, editors. A Political Companion to Philip Roth. UP of Kentucky, 2017. Google Scholar BOOK CHAPTERS Bloom, James D. “American Fiction After Mulvey.” Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture: Studies in Erotic Epistemology, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 165–88. Google Scholar Boozer, Jack. “The Intratextuality of Film Adaptation: From The Dying Animal to Elegy.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 197–213. Google Scholar Boswell, Marshall. “Ageing Novelists and the End of the American Century.” American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000, edited by Stephen J. Burn, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 48–62. Google Scholar Brühwiler, Claudia Franziska. “Serving his Tour as an ‘Exasperated Liberal and Indignant Citizen’: Philip Roth, a Public Intellectual?” A Political Companion to Philip Roth, Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 41–63. Carpi, Daniela. “Cultural Mobility and Diaspora: The Case of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock.” Diaspora, Law and Literature, edited by Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer, Walter de Gruyter, 2017, pp. 187–204. Google Scholar Connolly, Andy. “Philip Roth and the American ‘Underclass’ in The Human Stain.” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 238–62. Festl, Michael G. “Four Pathologies and a State of Sanity: Political Philosophy and Philip Roth on the Individual in Society.” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 95–118. Frediani, Federica. “Unsound Elegy: Breast Cancer in The Dying Animal by Philip Roth and Elegy by Isabel Coixet.” New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies, edited by Stephanie Hilger, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 253–65. Google Scholar Gordon, Louis. “Three Voices or One? Philip Roth and Zionism.” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 119–34. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. “The American Berserk in Sabbath’s Theater (1995).” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 220–37. Kinzel, Till. “‘Novotny’s Pain’: Philip Roth on the Politics and Problem of Pain.” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 161–71. Lang, Jessica. “American Fiction and the Act of Genocide.” Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust, Rutgers UP, 2017, pp. 119–54. Google Scholar Maurer, Yael. “The Body Politic: Philip Roth’s American Men.” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 172–90. Palmer, R. Barton. “Authorial Second Lives: Machaut, Chaucer, and Philip Roth.” Machaut’s Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Burt Kimmelman, UP of Florida, 2017, pp. 271–96. Google Scholar Parrish, Timothy. “History and Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction, edited by Paula Geyh, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 81–96. Google Scholar Pozorski, Aimee. “‘An ear in search of a word’: Writing and the Politics of Listening in Roth’s I Married a Communist.” Brühwiler and Trepanier, pp. 15–40. Shipe, Matthew...

The poetics and politics of space in DeLillo’s White Noise

This article explores the representation of space in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (Penguin, New York, 1985) in order to reveal its influence on the protagonist’s psyche and its significant role in deciding his fate. In particular, it discusses how the geographical coordinates and physical features of the novel function as complicit agents in shaping up the protagonist’s unstable state of mind and leading him to face an undesirable fate. The article takes into account Merlin Coverley’s concept of psychogeography to delineate the embodiment of the city (atmosphere) as an integral part of the protagonist’s life and a defining feature of postmodern American fiction. A psychogeographic understanding of White Noise further illuminates that urbanity, in its twentieth-century spirit, affects the psyche of the leading character who displays this deep impact through wandering (compulsively) in and around his urban environment. The article then clarifies how the city eventually reigns triumphant as the protagonist falls victim to hallucination and deep isolation, or is left with an aporetic moment of decision: to take on murder as the only alternative to reorder his life.

Media Medi(t)ations in Don Delillo’s Underworld

This paper explores the role of the media in the structure, narrative techniques, character development, plot and the story of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, one of the best- rated works of postmodern American fiction. DeLillo recognizes infinite possibilities of the media in novel composition, so mass media, the Internet, film, music, and art provide both the novel’s framework and the lens through which the world of the novel is perceived. However, media mediations are not always easy to recognize, as they are inextricable part of the novel’s texture, creating confusion over the primacy of the two worlds – the “real” one and that of the media model.

Postmodern American Literature and Its Other; Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database; From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction

Postmodern American Literature and Its Other; Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database; From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction

Postmodern American literature and its other

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.

From the Civil War to the apocalypse: postmodern history and American fiction

This is a reconsideration of the relationship between history and fiction in the context of postmodernism. Why don't we read novels as if they were histories and histories as if they were novels? Recent postmodern theorists such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon have argued that since history is a narrative art, it must be understood as a form of narrative representation analogous to fiction. Yet, contrary to the fears of some historians, such arguments have not undermined the practice of history as a meaningful enterprise so much as they have highlighted the appeal history has as a narrative craft. In addressing the postmodernist claim that history works no differently than fiction, Timothy Parrish rejects the implication that history is dead or hopelessly relativistic. Rather, he shows how the best postmodern novelists compel their readers to accept their narratives as true in the same way that historians expect their readers to accept their narratives as true. These novelists write history as a form of fiction. If the great pre-modernist American historians are Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Henry Adams, who are the great modernist or postmodernist historians? In the twentieth century, Parrish argues, the most powerful works of American history were written by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy. What survives a reading of these novels is the sense that writers otherwise identified as multicultural or postmodern share the view that nothing matters more than history and what one believes its possibilities to be. In other words, Parrish concludes, history, not identity, is the ground of postmodern American fiction.

Stuck in a Loop? Dialogue in Hypertext Fiction

Stuck in a Loop? Dialogue in Hypertext Fiction Bronwen Thomas (bio) Hypertext Fiction and Interactivity: Issues and Debates Hypertext fiction has provoked much debate since the appearance of the first examples in the late 80s. Much of this debate has been focused on questions regarding the status of these fictions, and their implications for the experience of writing and reading. Where close analysis of the form has been attempted (e.g. J. Yellowlees Douglas's readings of Joyce's afternoon, a story), it has mainly consisted of an attempt to "make sense" of the narrative, untangling the strands of the plot, and searching for some kind of closure. While this approach has offered valuable insights into the narrative structures of these fictions, and into the mechanics of the interfaces they employ, little attention has been paid to specific aspects of their style, especially the representation of speech and thought. Hypertext fiction has come a long way since the earliest examples, most notably in exploring the possibilities of creating a multimedia artifact where sounds and images accompany the written text.1 However, this paper will focus on the use of dialogue in two early hypertext fictions. Both Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story (first published 1987) and Yellowlees Douglas's I Have Said Nothing (1994) have achieved near-canonical status having been excerpted in print in the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction (Geyh). As is often the case with hypertext fictions, the writers, Jane Yellowlees Douglas and Michael Joyce, also happen to be two of the foremost theorists of the form, and the sense of mutual influence is unavoidable. The aims of this paper are twofold: to explore the functions of dialogue in these fictions and the extent to which the representations are [End Page 357] innovative; and to examine whether we need to reassess our models for understanding the functions and forms of fictional dialogue as we have begun to apply them to the print novel. For critics such as Marie-Laure Ryan, now that the hype about hypertext fiction has died down, we are left with the sobering fact that outside of university departments and a fairly small group of writers/theorists, these fictions are not widely read or talked about. Questions have been raised about the quality of the writing, and scepticism expressed about the more overblown claims made for the form. In particular, the claim that such fictions offer the reader an interactive experience has been exposed as both hollow and naively literal (e.g. Miall). But this debate has at least led to a fascinating examination of what exactly we mean by interaction, which has important implications for the study of exchanges that take place within the story world, as well as for those that take place between reader and writer, hitherto the main focus. Existing studies of dialogue-as-interaction (Leech and Short; Toolan) tend to focus on set-piece scenes, and conversational routines or rituals, but the very idea that we can isolate and fix on a "conversation" as some kind of event becomes much more problematic in hypertext fiction as the context and even the content of what is said is much more mutable. Nevertheless, when we approach dialogue in hypertext fictions, it is instructive to remember that there is a long history of experimentation with the technique in the print novel, raising important issues to do with the forms and functions of narrative and their ideological implications. Michael Joyce frequently acknowledges both in his nonfictional writing and in the intertextual references within his novels, his debt to writers such as James Joyce ("the Greater Joyce"), Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein. I shall argue that some of the techniques employed in hypertext fiction are recognizable from print novels, but this is not to say, as critics of hypertext fictions tend to do, that there is nothing new here. Rather, it is to assert that the representation of speech, too often dismissed or ignored as merely providing "colour" and "variety" in a text, is crucial to our understanding and experience of that text, whether it be in print or hypertext form, and that experimentation with the device may provoke far reaching questions about the...

Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Conte, Joseph. 2002. Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. $59.95 hc. $24.95 sc. 312 pp.Academics interested in postmodern theory will enjoy Joseph Conte's Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction. Its theoretical conjectures-if problematic-are nevertheless bold and interesting, and Conte's application of theory to individual works yields remarkable interpretations. Taking his lead from works like N. Katherine Hayles's Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990), Conte further develops and applies chaos theory to postmodern literature, explicating it in context of United States. Here, he examines numerous authors, prominent among them John Hawkes, Kathy Acker, Don Delillo, and Thomas Pynchon.His theory of postmodern literature, like Fredric Jameson's, envisions a permanent and irreparable breach between modernist and postmodernist works. Using Thomas Kuhn's proposal that scientific progress proceeds via radical paradigm shifts, Conte asserts modernist science and literature have been superceded by new paradigm of postmodern science and literature. Citing authors ranging from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Conte reads modernism and traditional science as part of outmoded paradigm which obsessively seeks to reality because of a latent fear of and unpredictability. This results in a modernist political aesthetic whose concern for centering control approaches fascism (2002, 11).However, artist or scientist working in emerging postmodern paradigm does not fear such instability and uncertainty. Following Jean Francois Lyotard, postmodern artist has incredulity toward metanarratives and expresses affinity for-rather than aversion to-forms of disorder (Lyotard qtd. in Conte 2002, 6, 8). Thus, postmodernist also dispenses with modernism's binary distinction and hierarchy of order/disorder, replacing it with attitude resembling two primary branches of chaos theory, which investigate order as possible emanation of disorder, and chaos as one possible result of overly stringent order-the process by which one becomes other (9). One sees and disorder's intertwining relationship through each novel's world building-a task indicative of order-and the inventive form of novel, most prominent feature of which is nonlinear narrative-a form suggesting (2).I particularly liked Conte's reading of John Hawkes's Travesty, wherein he emphasizes emerging from disorder. In imagination of a suicidal driver-narrator, we see a beautiful, well-engineered sports car obliterated in an 'accident . . . perfectly contrived by narrator himself. This, of course, is paradoxical, since it challenges binary opposition between deterministic and stochastic, event that has a causal relation to its antecedent and one that is purely result of random processes (2002, 38). While driver has planned accident, it is also possible that unintended accident may occur while driver speeds to his intended destination, side of old farmhouse. Thus, we have order, but unavoidable possibility of chaos. Though story's entirety takes place in car as it zips to intended destination, Conte submits that linearity remains suspended as the narration refutes any claim to suspense as a means of galvanizing reader's attention (34). …

Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Design and debris: a chaotics of postmodern American fiction

Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden in disorder (whose authors Conte terms proceduralists), and those whose structures reflect the opposite, disorder emerging from states of order (whose authors Conte calls disruptors). Documenting the paradigm shift from modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world, to postmodernism, in which the artist portrays the process of orderly disorder, Conte shows how the shift has led to postmodern artists' embrace of science in their treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and cognitive science, he suggests a second paradigm shift: from modernist specialization to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is freed from the purely literary and engages in a greater degree of interactivity - between literature and science, and between author and reader. Thus, Conte concludes, contemporary literature is a literature of flux and flexibility.

Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (review)

"Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands (review)

??? COHPAnATIST general will profit from this important body of scholarship. Most important, the many critics of"theory" in our discipline, those who lament the second-rate scholarship and fatuous generalizations ofcareless ideologues and ignorant culture critics and thereby dismiss the entire theoretical enterprise, will meet here with worthy opponents, formidable thinkers who articulate sophisticated philosophical positions, avoid reductive historical generalizations, and challenge realist epistemological assumptions in their domain ofgreatest strength—that ofscience and technology. Ronald BogueUniversity ofGeorgia REVIEWS THEO D'HAEN AND HANS BERTENS, eds. "Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997 (Postmodern Studies 20). 267 pp. Judging from a number ofrecent reappraisals ofpostmodern fiction, the antifoundational approaches developed by postmodernism in response to Cold War ideologies have appeared outmoded to some ofus after the collapse ofthose normative metanarratives in the events of 1989. In volume 5 of 7Ae Encyclopedia ofWorld Literature in the 20th Century (ed. Steven R. Serafín. New York: Continuum, 1993), Robert F. Kiernan notes that postmodem metafictionists have "ceased in the 1 980s to enjoy the critical deference they received in the late 1960s and 1970s [...]. [Their works] found only limited audiences, not just because they are inherently difficult books, but because their self-reflexive conceits and multidimensional, nonlinear combinations of fantasies, joke, and horror seem to many readers a throwback to the intellectual temper ofthe 1970s" (26). As this description suggests, the swerving away from experimentalism has ideological motivation. The prevailing tendency after 1989 has been to push postmodern innovation to the margin as part ofa counteroffensive against those alternative paradigms deemed responsible for the current crisis of authority, identity, and values. Critics ofvarious stripes want to "rescue" fiction from its engagement with language and the subversive ideologies ofthe sixties, returning it to conventional forms ofrealism. The recent Modern Library list ofthe 100 best twentieth-century novels in English is a case in point. Few postmodernists made the list (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, John Fowles, and Salmon Rushdie). Conspicuously absent were Coover, Pynchon, and Reed, but also Atwood, Morrison, and Walker. In an amnesic revision mat took literature back one or two generations, the list reinstated the primarily white male canon from Joyce and Fitzgerald to Saul Bellow, William Golding, and James Dickey. By contrast, the writers featured in Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens' collection ofessays on the reception ofpostwar American fiction in four Western European countries are exactly those left out by the Modern Library list: Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Thomas Pynchon, and Ronald Sulenick (Paul Neubauer, "The General Reception of Postmodern American Literature in Germany " 9); also postmodern feminist and ethnic authors like Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Marilyn French, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker. The primary Italian bibliography ofBarthelme, William S. Burroughs, Coover, James Purdy, and VcH. 24 (2000): 171 REVIEWS Pynchon "is almost as rich as the American one" (Daniela Daniele, "The Fate of Postmodern American Fiction in Italy" 149). In Spain, certain translations of Barthelme, Cisneros, Don DeLillo, Gaddis, Jerzy Kosinski, Morrison, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut have run through several reprints (Francesco Collado-Rodríguez, "The Columbus Connection: American Postmodern Fiction in Spain" 177, 178-81); so have Vonnegut's works in the Netherlands (Frans Ruiter, "The Reception ofPostmodem American Fiction in the Netherlands" 223) or those ofAbish, Barth, Coover, Federman, and Pynchon in Germany (Neubauer 12, 24). Federman's German bibliography may soon overtake his American one, including for example radio plays not performed in the US. Academic criticism in Western Europe has devoted monographs not only to Pynchon and Vonnegut, but also to William Gass, Federman, feminist metropolitan fiction, or postmodern short story writers, treating their works as "acts ofdefiance and critique," attempts to break open official history and develop "ironic and parodistic counter-histories oftheir own" (Neubauer 82, 88). Substantial literary anthologies and collections of essays, such as Gerhard Hoffmann's three-volume Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von derModerne zur Postmoderne (1988), have supplemented the picture, refining or problematizing its contours. The convergence oftranslation, magazine criticism, and academic research has ensured a multidimensional "reception of...

Postmodern American fiction: a Norton anthology

It includes works by sixty-eight authors: short fiction, novels, cartoons, graphics, hypertexts, creative nonfiction, and theoretical writings. This is the first anthology to do full justice to the vast range of American innovation in fiction writing since 1945.

Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture and History in Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture and History in Postmodern American Fiction (review)

Deep surfaces: mass culture & history in postmodern American fiction

This work explores the relations between mass culture and historical thinking in the work of such American novelists as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Bobbie Ann Mason and Nicholson Baker. It examines how mass culture shapes postmodern conditions of knowledge.

Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930- 1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 David W. Madden Steven Weisenburger. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 320 pp. In Fables of Subversion Steven Weisenburger challenges a host of traditional notions about satire and postmodern American fiction. In spite of its seemingly limited scope—American novels between 1930 and 1980—Weisenburger offers a serious and probing refutation of New Critical assumptions that have dominated scholarly and popular discourse on the subject. [End Page 848] The study’s introduction carefully lays the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the five remaining chapters. Weisenburger draws a crucial distinction between generative and “degenerative” satirical writing, with the generative mode representing traditional satires. The degenerative mode he describes as “delegitimizing . . . function[ing] to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own. Still more, it suspects that any symbolic practice may entail incursions of power whose logic tends toward either total domination or the final chaos of reciprocal violence.” This degenerative mode is largely a postmodern phenomenon. Drawing primarily on Jean-François Lyotard, Weisenburger emphasizes the postmodern doubt about the modernists’ attempts to use literature as a way of establishing a canon of high art and enlightenment. Instead, postmodern art emphasizes contingency and pluralist approaches, which, “[d]espite all their apparent negativity and nihilism, . . . the subversive carnivals of postmodernism bear witness to the opening of a ‘pagan’ discourse that was always at the heart of modern darkness.” Postmodern satirists “suspect all structures, including structures of perceiving, representing, and transforming,” and their works interrogate the violence and terror inherent in established cultural forms of discourse. Consistent features of the contemporary satire are its deformations of plot, grotesque violence, transtextuality, and excessive attention to details. Weisenburger clearly demonstrates the ways in which Formalist criticism has dominated the scholarship on satire, defining conventions which simply have nothing to do with degenerative, postmodern fictions. Weisenburger refutes the validity of four crucial assumptions underlying traditional criticism—satire is a rhetorical formulation offering a rational argument and appealing to the common opinions of a majority of readers; it requires an extramural object of attack rather than the act of fiction-making itself; satire is a moral or ethical corrective; and it is normative. In each case he demonstrates that the methods and purposes of degenerative satire have nothing in common with conventions drawn from far more conventional satiric models. Finally, the introduction considers research on the grotesque and carnivalesque to clarify the sensibility of degenerative satire. “Carnival definitively illustrates the semiotic processes of dismantling and exposure of [End Page 849] which satire is a part. Amid its disorder, one discovers points of view, specific orderings that are suppressed by or in sharp opposition to authorized representations.” The lineage of writers considered begins with Nathanael West whose works tend increasingly toward the fully accomplished degenerative mode defined in the first chapter. The Day of the Locust is the apogee of West’s satiric practices and a work that “can be read as a narrative about the troubled emergence of a radical, degenerative mode of satire.” Analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and John Hawkes’s The Cannibal emphasize the contemporary development of this sensibility. A chapter devoted to Black Humor presents the most careful and well-argued reevaluation of that literary phenomenon to date. While regarding Black Humor as “the early, literary expression of an emerging postmodernism,” Weisenburger cuts through the hyperbole of many longstanding assumptions to demonstrate that the impulse to joke dominates the fictions of Kurt Vonnegut, J. P. Donleavy, and Terry Southern. James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, a book for some time overlooked by critics and scholars, is seen as an inspired failure, while Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Hawkes’s Travesty are submitted as the most daring and fully realized examples of Black Humor satire. A fourth chapter addresses examples of social and political satire in the 1960s, wherein Weisenburger argues that postmodern American satires have less to do with corrective solutions than the exposition of dissent...

Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism

Introduction Thomas Pynchon has written some of America's most imaginative and intellectually suggestive fiction of the postwar period. And, responsive to his work's richness, critical attention has in due course been paid to a myriad of topics he has examined. One important subject, however, has not been ade- quately addressed in Pynchonian scholarship. No sustained effort has been made to see Pynchon's work as embracing a determinate political stance or political philosophy.1 It is the latter that will provide the focus of this essay. It should be said from the outset that important features of postmodern American fiction have discouraged readers from looking for philosophical coherence of any sort. As reflected in various works by, for example, Walter Abish, Paul Auster, Frederick Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick, unrelieved epistem- ological doubt and antic involution of form do not provide the method- ological foundations for a coherent political philosophy. Scepticism typically yields local and often ambiguous insights, not comprehensive understanding. And for its part, formal experimentation—and certainly postmodern fiction's recurrent obsession with parody—inevitably invites readings that, advertently or otherwise, emphasize aesthetic autonomy.2 In the case of Pynchon, readers have quite astutely identified the general lines of his critique of modern America and Western civilization as a whole, but, with rare exception, Pynchon's political philosophy has typically been either overlooked or reduced to an amorphous postmodern disillusionment or some sort of dark pessimism or even disappointed humanism.3

Utopias Limited: Post-sixties and Postmodern American Fiction

Utopia Limited: Post-Sixties and Postmodern American Fiction Marianne DeKoven (bio) Both utopianism and postmodernism have been seen as quintessentially or characteristically American phenomena. 1 This essay will investigate some interrelations between the two. I will begin (appropriately, I hope, for an essay on “historiographic” fiction) 2 by telling a historical story in order to provide the necessary groundwork for my arguments. The heyday of American utopianism, in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, saw the blossoming of hundreds of communities, the names of some of them at the heart of our cultural history (Brook Farm, the Shakers, the Icarians, Oneida, Amana, to mention a few of the best known). Socialist and, in the case of the Owenite communities, feminist egalitarianism were crucial to these utopian communities. 3 This historical utopian cornucopia also coincided, of course, with the heyday of slavery. The utopian movements overlapped with and sometimes embraced (fostered, were committed to) Abolitionism, with Brook Farm a prime instance. It is clear that utopianism and Abolitionism shared the universalist, Enlightenment ideals of human equality and freedom. I would argue that Radical Reconstruction, including most notably the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865–1872), hoped and even attempted to realize the goals of utopianism and Abolition, and that the destruction of Reconstruction [End Page 75] marked the defeat, at least for that historical moment, of the social goals and visions of both. 4 The period in the 1870s and 1880s following the dissolution of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the ultimate defeat of Reconstruction, was a post-utopian historical moment. It witnessed the break-up and disappearance of most of the antebellum utopian communities, contemporaneous with the institution of slavery by other means in the sharecropping Black Belt South, and of systemic, often murderous racism throughout the country. At the same time, this period encompassed the stunning growth of industrial capitalism in the urban North, with its rampant social miseries as yet unchecked by subsequent radical and reformist movements. American utopianism had another renaissance in the 1960s, with, again, hundreds of communities (none of them as famous or successful as their nineteenth-century predecessors) springing up all over the country. Like their predecessors, these communities were committed to egalitarianism and crucially linked to a resurgence of socialism, though there were many differences: 1960s communities were generally marked by an anarcho-syndicalist version of socialism, emphasizing personal, individual freedom, pleasure and fulfillment at the expense of group unity or coherence (“the common good”). 5 They were therefore much more ephemeral and fragile than the generally more group-oriented, and sometimes rigidly rule-governed, nineteenth-century communities. 6 Despite this difference of emphasis, however, the 60s communes were varyingly, loosely, but consistently committed to ideals of common ownership, equitably shared labor, and an egalitarian power structure based on the New Left ideal of participatory democracy (the hierarchical, guru-governed religious communes were an exception). 7 The antagonisms between the political New Left and the countercultural hippie utopian communes are well documented, but they should not obscure the fact that the New Left and the counterculture were two facets of a broad, general movement that had at its core a commitment to socialist egalitarianism—liberty, equality, community—including racial, class, and, sometimes, gender equality. These issues were highly complex and troubled: most hippies, and therefore most hippie communes, were white and middle-class. Further, because both radicalism and the counterculture were exaggeratedly macho and male dominated until the emergence of second-wave feminism in the final phase of (out of the ashes [End Page 76] of) the 60s, they usually reproduced dominant gender inequalities, often in exaggerated versions, despite their egalitarian ideologies. Like the post-Reconstruction period, the period following the demise and defeat of the 60s—a period I would argue continues into the present—is also a post-utopian moment. 8 This post-utopian moment is the period we now call postmodernism, or postmodernity. Many studies mark the decline or end of egalitarian, socialist-based or -inspired utopianism in postmodernism. 9 In this essay, I want to discuss the status of utopianism in two postmodernist works of fiction, both of them set in the post-utopian early 1870s. I have chosen these two seemingly...