Research Guide to American Literature

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

Collects essays on the structuring of Postmodernism in works by Jerome
Klinkowitz, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver; the relationship between
history and fiction in Postmodernism; the Postmodernist American sports
novel; Postmodernism and detective fiction in the work of Paul Auster; and
Postmodernism and science fiction in works by Philip K. Dick and Ursula K.
Le Guin.


Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993).
Useful collection with helpful introductions to the selections, which represent the
major articulations of Postmodernism across many of the arts.


Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2003).
Discusses works by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Trey Ellis, Charles Johnson,
Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wide-
man in the context of Postmodernism and urbanity.


Emily Griesinger and Mark Eaton, eds., The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a
Postmodern World (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006).
Collection edited from a Christian perspective that goes against the grain of most
Postmodernist resistance to the idea of a grand narrative underpinning reality.
The book includes essays on films and novels, including works by Don DeLillo,
Amy Tan, and John Okada.


Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991).
A landmark work on feminism and Postmodernism.


Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
One of the earliest analyses of Postmodernism in American literature, including
an often-cited table of comparisons to Modernist writing and identifications of
key writers.


Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary
Feminist Narrative (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Important discussion of the intersections between Postmodernism and feminism.
Until the publication of this work, studies of Postmodernism had been almost
exclusively male and masculinist.


W. Lawrence Hogue, Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the
Literatures of People of Color since the 1960s (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1996).
Looks at multiculturalism and Postmodernity as intertwined, rather than sepa-
rate, impulses and offers readings of works by Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday,
Richard Rodriguez, Andrea Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Bradley, and
Richard Perry within that context.


Postmodernism 1
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