10 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
the thriller, the detective story, the myth saga, the science-fiction and speculative
novel, fantasy, romance, the realistic psychological novel, and even pornography
may intertwine in a given work.
Literary and artistic movements typically react to what came before them.
Therefore, even though a purely temporal definition may not be satisfactory, it
can be helpful to an understanding of Postmodernism to delineate its similarities
to, and differences from, Modernism. Like Modernist fiction by authors such as
William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and
Virginia Woolf, many Postmodernist texts feature scrambled chronologies, stream
of consciousness, neologisms and other wordplay, and multiple perspectives. Yet,
there is a fundamental difference in philosophical outlook and, thus, a difference
in the uses to which these techniques are put. The Modernists believed in the
power of art to save, to heal, and to make things whole; Postmodernists do not
share this faith. Modernists also believed in the possibility of a grand narrative;
Postmodernists do not. Furthermore, while both Modernist and Postmodernist
writers use fragments of the art and literature of the past in their own works,
Modernists do so respectfully; Postmodernists tend to use such fragments
ironically.
Students will find that criticism of American Postmodernist literature from
the 1960s through the early 1990s tends to discuss only a small group of white
male writers: John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo,
William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. These authors wrote
self-reflexive works that downplay characterization and story in favor of irony,
metafiction, game playing, and fragmentation. Barth, whose fictions are unre-
lentingly metafictional and self-referential, published two essays in the Atlantic
Monthly that are influential in discussions of Postmodernism. “The Literature
of Exhaustion” (1967) appeared to declare that the novel form was “used up.” In
“The Literature of Replenishment” (1980) Barth claimed that his earlier point
had been misconstrued: he merely meant that literary conventions grow stale
and need to be “retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed
against themselves to generate new and lively work.” Coover’s novel The Univer-
sal Baseball Association, Inc ., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1971) delights in play while
asking large questions about theology and the creative act. His The Public Burn-
ing (1977) satirizes Richard Nixon and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case,
exemplifying the Postmodernist deflating of authority. Vonnegut’s works provide
many examples of Postmodernist forays into genre fiction, particularly science
fiction. Pynchon’s V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973) demonstrate early Postmodernist expressions of paranoia and interest in
ferreting out underlying systems and structures that ultimately prove to be elu-
sive if not imaginary. The critic Patrick O’Donnell believes that paranoia is the
“symptomatic condition of postmodernity” rather than a personal psychological
state. Most early Postmodernist works employ parody, although in these works it
does not necessarily carry the sense of ridicule traditionally associated with it; the
student should consult the books by Jameson and Linda Hutcheon for extended
discussions of parody in Postmodernism. With the publication in 1989 of Molly
Hite’s The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist