1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Criticism
Rachel Adams, “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism,” Twentieth-
Century Literature, 53 (Fall 2007): 248–272.
Argues that Postmodernism gave way as a primary literary mode in the
late 1980s to “American literary globalism,” a new paradigm with differing
assumptions.
John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly, 220 (August
1967): 29–34; and “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fic-
tion,” Atlantic Monthly, 245 ( January 1980): 65–71; both reprinted in his
The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonf iction (New York: Putnam, 1984), pp.
62–76, 193–206.
Two articles that discuss trends in fiction in contemporary literature, the first
focusing on the need for new approaches and the second on who and what is
Postmodernist.
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New
York: Guilford Press, 1991).
Provides accessible readings of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, Theodor W.
Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and others for the advanced student who wishes to
understand the theories surrounding Postmodernism.
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contempo-
rary (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989).
Accessible, respected overview of Postmodernist debates in philosophy, political
theory, architecture, art, photography, literature, drama, film, television, popular
culture, and cultural politics.
Connor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
Offers an introduction by Connor, a chronology, and ten essays on Postmodern-
ism in philosophy, film, literature, art, performance, space, science and technology,
religion, ethics, and law.
Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmod-
ern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
Argues that the 1960s embodied simultaneously the full, final expression of the
Modern and the beginning of the Postmodern and that Postmodernism grew out
of the politics of the 1960s rather than as a reaction to Modernism. DeKoven
offers readings of many classic 1960s texts by authors such as William S. Bur-
roughs, Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, and Hunter S. Thompson, as well as Bob
Dylan’s music, the Port Huron Statement (1962), and Toni Morrison’s post-1960s
Beloved (1987).
Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, eds., Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmod-
ernism, Postmodern Studies, 11 (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995).