Romantic Postmodernism in American FictionIntended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence. |
Contents
The Beginnings of Postmodernism in American Fiction 2536 | 25 |
CHAPTER | 41 |
CHAPTER | 58 |
CHAPTER | 73 |
CHAPTER | 90 |
CHAPTER | 110 |
CHAPTER | 133 |
CHAPTER | 153 |
CHAPTER | 171 |
CHAPTER | 189 |
CHAPTER | 207 |
CHAPTER | 223 |
CHAPTER | 240 |
258279 | 258 |
CUMULATIVE LIST OF WORKS CITED 280288 | 280 |
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Common terms and phrases
American Fiction Augie March Auster Barth belief Black Blue Breakfast of Champions Celie Celie's chaos characters Color Purple contemporary critics Dahfu Dead Father Deborah Devil disjunctive Emerson essay explains fantastic feel Fenwick Flannery O'Connor Fractals Francis ghosts Gravity's Rainbow Hawthorne Hawthorne's Henderson the Rain human ideas interview Ironweed Johnson Kelly Kepesh Kilgore Trout killed Kurt Vonnegut Literature living look Macon Mailer Manichean Mason metaphor Milkman modernist narrative narrator nature neo-modernist neo-romantic Nettie nineteenth century romantics Norman Norman Mailer notion novel novella outlook Pilate postmodernist fiction protagonist quest Rain King Ralph Waldo Rayber realistic reality rocket Rojack romantic postmodernism romantic postmodernists Romanticism Sabbatical Salinger Saul Bellow says Sheppard Shug Slaughterhouse-Five Slothrop Song of Solomon soul spiritual story suggests supernatural Susan Tarwater tells themes thing Thomas Pynchon Thoreau Todorov Toni Morrison Univ view of art Viking Walt writing York Trilogy Zooey
Popular passages
Page 15 - The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; - as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
Page 14 - For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem — a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Page 1 - A salient example from the history of painting is the manifestly metonymical orientation of cubism, where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches; the surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the productions of DW Griffith, the art of the...
Page 19 - Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.
Page 14 - For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings...
Page 3 - ... on experience, the second on consciousness ; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.