Research Guide to American Literature

Narrative more attention began to be paid to Postmodernist writing by women
and people of color.
One can also divide literary Postmodernism into stages by decade, begin-
ning in the 1960s with the Black Humor and absurdist experiments of Barth,
Barthelme, Coover, Gass, Pynchon, and Vonnegut. The critic Ihab Hassan was a
key figure in the delineation of the characteristics of this early stage. These trends
continued in the 1970s, but in the 1980s more emphasis was placed on simulacra
in the work of DeLillo and E. L. Doctorow. Also in the 1980s Hutcheon and
Brian McHale published important studies of Postmodernist fiction. Hutcheon
introduced the phrase “historiographic metafiction” to describe self-reflexive
works that include historical personages and events; examples include Doctorow’s
The Book of Daniel (1971) and Ragtime (1975) and Coover’s The Public Burn-
ing. In the 1990s and early 2000s the sophisticated self-awareness, wryness, and
irony of early Postmodernism continued, but telling an engaging story with fully
realized characters came to be just as important; instances include works by Paul
Auster, Tim O’Brien, and David Foster Wallace.
For a recently proposed alternative view students may consult Rachel
Adams’s “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism” (2007). Adams
argues that Postmodernism ended in the late 1980s, giving way to a new para-
digm, “American literary globalism,” in which ethnic writers and a rejuvenated
emphasis on emotional storytelling become prominent; while the Postmodernist
reacts to a sense of hidden connections behind the surface of life with paranoia,
as in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), American
literary globalism upholds the interconnectedness of life all across the planet.
The Postmodernist skepticism regarding grand narratives and ideas of prog-
ress, rationality, and scientific objectivity grows in part out of the fact that those
ideas historically failed to take cultural differences into account. Accordingly,
Postmodernism opens the door to more perspectives. Until well into the 1990s,
however, most criticism treated Postmodernism and multiculturalism as parallel
but separate manifestations of contemporary American literature. More-recent
criticism has begun to recognize that ethnic writers of the contemporary period
are responsible for some extremely thought-provoking writing that is also strongly
Postmodernist. Ana Castillo combines the “high” form of the family saga with
pop-culture telenovelas (soap operas) in her novel So Far from God (1993), while
her fellow Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros uses pastiche in “Little Miracles, Kept
Promises” and techniques such as genre-blending, parody, and a strong sense of
irony in many of the other stories in her collection Woman Hollering Creek (1991).
Maxine Hong Kingston blurs the line between memoir and novel in The Woman
Warrior (1975) and offers Postmodernist play throughout Tripmaster Monkey: His
Fake Book (1989). Michael Chabon explores Jewish identity while interpolating
adventure stories, detective fiction, and comic-book narratives in The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) and combines detective fiction and an
alternate-universe plot in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). Native Ameri-
can authors Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko employ
Postmodernist techniques and sensibilities along with a historically grounded
sense of the philosophies and traditions of their respective tribes. Among African

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