12 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
American writers, Ishmael Reed has engaged in Postmodernist game playing,
metafiction, and parody from the beginning of his career in the 1960s, and Toni
Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Trey Ellis are often mentioned in discussions
of Postmodernism. The Jewish writer Philip Roth created an alter ego, Nathan
Zuckerman, who appears as the narrator and a character in several of his novels,
highlighting the metafictional and self-reflexive nature of those works. Although
it would be exaggerating to claim that everything in contemporary American lit-
erature is Postmodernist, one can trace a Postmodern sensibility—particularly the
strong presence of irony and sense of self-consciousness—in many of the major
writers discussed in this volume.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Students might find it profitable to become familiar with some liter-
ary techniques that frequently appear in Postmodernist writing and then
explore works by authors who are known for being particularly adept at
those strategies. Probably the most commonly mentioned techniques are
metafiction and self-reflexivity: they refer to fiction that calls attention to
its own artificiality. While not invented by Postmodernists—self-reflexivity
reaches back to the earliest history of the novel in Henry Fielding’s The
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760–1767)—it has become quite
prevalent in their writing. Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968)
is a typical coming-of-age/initiation story but is constantly interrupted by
the author with comments about his process of writing the story. In Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) a character named Kurt Vonnegut
speaks to the reader in the first chapter and sporadically through the rest
of the novel. O’Brien appears as a character and muses on the process of
writing in many of his works. Patricia Waugh’s Metaf iction: The Theory and
Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984) and Hutcheon’s The Poetics of Post-
modernism (1988) offer helpful discussions of metafiction. Students might
also explore parody, pastiche, irony, and intertexuality as they appear in
Postmodernist writing. - Students might read one of the works about which a full essay appears in Part
III of this volume, look at some of the criticism in its “Resources” list, and
consider why the work is or is not considered Postmodernist. What techniques
does it display? If the work is designated “Postmodernist” by the critics, does
that designation seem to be a matter of style, content, or both? How does it
deepen your understanding of the work to think of it as Postmodernist? If the
work is generally considered “multicultural,” does it also fit into the Postmod-
ernist camp? - For authors who are engaged in an explicitly Postmodernist project, students
might find it instructive to compare one of their early works to one of their
more-recent texts: for instance, Pynchon’s V. or The Crying of Lot 49 to Mason
& Dixon (1997) or Inherent Vice (2009), or DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) to
Cosmopolis (2003) or Falling Man (2007). How has the representation of the