material world and its impact on human consciousness changed over time in
these authors’ works?- Genre blending is a common strategy in Postmodernist fiction. In addition,
many “serious” writers have chosen to write within the confines of what is
commonly considered genre fiction. For instance, Chabon has published a
detective novel, The Final Solution (2004), and an alternate-universe novel,
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Vonnegut commonly employed science-fiction
conventions and tropes in his novels. Reed parodies the Western in his Yellow
Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and other genres in many of his other works.
Students might choose any of these texts and consider whether it stretches
the boundaries of the given genre, and, if so, how it does so. Such genre blur-
ring usually also blurs the distinction between “high” art and popular culture.
What does the author gain or lose by admitting popular-culture references
and conventions into his or her fiction? Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens
offer several essays on genre blurring in their anthology Narrative Turns and
Minor Genres in Postmodernism (1995). A useful discussion, especially of sci-
ence-fiction tropes, can be found in McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987). - Students might also wish to consider the shifting boundary between fact
and fiction in Postmodernist writing. The selections in Paula Geyh, Fred G.
Leebron, and Andrew Levy’s Postmodern American Fiction (1998) offer many
useful examples of this. Authors to explore for this topic include Vonnegut,
Norman Mailer, Kingston, O’Brien, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
RESOURCES
Primary Works
R. V. Cassill and Joyce Carol Oates, eds., The Norton Anthology of Contemporary
Fiction, second edition (New York: Norton, 1998).
A collection of more than forty short stories by Postmodernist, multicultural,
realist, and other writers. Useful biographical sketches appear at the end of the
book.
Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds., Postmodern American Fic-
tion: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 1998).
Wide-ranging selections of fiction from the contemporary period, divided
into the sections “Breaking the Frame,” “Fact Meets Fiction,” “Popular Culture
and High Culture Collide,” “Revisiting History,” “Revising Tradition,” and
“Technoculture.” Ten critical readings by key theorists of Postmodernism are also
included.
Oates and Christopher R. Beha, eds., The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary Ameri-
can Short Fiction (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008).
Forty-eight short stories, most published in the twenty-first century, with a brief
but valuable preface by Oates in which she argues that the short stories of the
1980s through the early 2000s are less self-consciously experimental than those
of the 1960s and 1970s. She identifies the simulation of memoir and “vernacular
urgency” as literary strategies that entice readers.