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The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh
Mas'ud Zavarzadeh
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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Extract

Recent American experimental fiction, in response to the fictive behaviour of the emerging realities of a technetronic culture, moves beyond the interpretive modernist novel in which the fictionist interpreted the ‘ human condition ’ within the framework of a comprehensive private metaphysics, towards a metamodern narrative with zero degree of interpretation. The mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘ reality ’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 1975 , pp. 69 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

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17 I am using this term to refer to a cluster of attitudes which have emerged since the mid-1950s. I shall use the term ‘metamodernist’ in conjunction with three others to describe various aesthetic and ideational approaches to the art of narrative in the present century. I retain ‘Modernist’ for the ideas associated with Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and their followers. The reaction against their poetics in the 1950s by such writers as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and C. P. Snow I label ‘Anti-Modernist’. The modified and sometimes radicalized continuation of the Modernist aesthetics in the works of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and others I shall call ‘Para-Modernist’.

Some critics use the single term ‘Post-modern’ to describe these new developments. However the term is too general to catch all the nuances. Hassan, Ihab's Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971)Google Scholar, for example, discusses Kafka with Hemingway and Beckett, boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature (1972– ) has a grab-bag approach to recent writing, covering such an assortment of items as to make the term synonymous with ‘post-war literature’. Graff, Gerald's ‘the myth of postmodern breakthrough’, in TriQuarterly (no. 26, pp. 383–414)Google Scholar lumps together everything published since the decline of the Proust-Mann-Joyce-Pound-Eliot tradition.

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33 I wish to thank Teresa L. Ebert of the University of Oregon for reading this paper before submission, and to acknowledge that the extract from ‘You Must be Kidding’ by Larry L. King on pp. 71–2 is reprinted by permission of THE NEW REPUBLIC, © 1969, The New Republic, Inc.