Succeeding Postmodernism
Succeeding Postmodernism

Author: Mary K. Holland

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1441159347

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While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Literary Research and American Postmodernism
Literary Research and American Postmodernism

Author: Emily Witsell

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-07-18

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0810892766

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Literary Research and American Postmodernism is a guide to scholarly research in the field of American postmodern literature, which this volume defines as the period between 1950 and 1990. This work aims to provide advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars of literature with a comprehensive view of the print and online resources available in literature and related subject areas. The volume offers best practices for research, especially for the challenges inherent to the field of American postmodernism, and provides scholars with a path toward success in their research endeavors. The opening chapters describe the state of academic research in the literary field and how to formulate an appropriate research topic, develop keywords, and use advanced search techniques to improve search results. One chapter is devoted to how to navigate library catalogs, read a catalog record, and locate materials in libraries worldwide. Subsequent chapters describe general reference resources, print and electronic bibliographies, and scholarly journals that focus on literature in the second half of the twentieth century. The author identifies resources for locating the book reviews and historical magazines and newspapers that can offer insight into the history of particular author’s publications. The unique challenges and promises of archival research are outlined, along with tips for getting the most out of a trip to a special collections library to perform primary research. Web resources and techniques for finding scholarly resources on the Internet are addressed in addition to subscription-based or library-owned materials. The final chapter synthesizes the information described in the previous chapters by taking the reader through a real-life research question and demonstrating how a scholar might locate resources on a difficult topic. An appendix of resources in related fields suggests additional directions the researcher might explore.

Post-Postmodernism
Post-Postmodernism

Author: Jeffrey Nealon

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0804783217

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Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era. Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

International Postmodernism
International Postmodernism

Author: Johannes Willem Bertens

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 622

ISBN-13: 9789027234452

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Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world. Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation. This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.

From Puritanism to Postmodernism
From Puritanism to Postmodernism

Author: Richard Ruland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 1317234146

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Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.

Writing After War
Writing After War

Author: John Limon

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0195087593

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This treatise develops a theory of the relationship of war in general to literature in general, to make sense of American literary history in particular. "The Iliad", argues the author, inaugurates literary history on the failure of war to be formally beautiful.

Postmodern/Postwar and After
Postmodern/Postwar and After

Author: Jason Gladstone

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2016-07

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 160938427X

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Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism
Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism

Author: Stephen J. Burn

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-27

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1441191240

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Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Signs and Cities
Signs and Cities

Author: Madhu Dubey

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0226167283

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Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism
The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism

Author: Linda Wagner-Martin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-03

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1351719319

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The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism offers readers a fresh, insightful overview to all genres of postmodern writing. Drawing on a variety of works from not only mainstream authors but also those that are arguably unconventional, renowned scholar Linda Wagner-Martin gives the reader a solid framework and foundation to reading, understanding, and appreciating postmodern literature since its inception through the present day.