About the Book
Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels.
Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
A Note on Usage
1 Introduction
Terminal Confusion
Postmodernist Realism
Is Postmodernism a Zombie?
How to Use This Book
2 Postmodern Conditions and
Postmodernist Styles
Postmodern Economic, Political, and Social Conditions
Postmodernist Aesthetic Approaches, Styles, and Techniques
3 Identities: Mysteries of the Self
Deconstructing the Self: Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote (1986)
Detecting the Self: Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
Hybrid Selves: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)
Th e Abstract Self: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003)
Th e Terrorized Self: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant
Fundamentalist (2007)
Self as Community: Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980)
The Selfless Self: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013)
4 Bodies: Refl ective Surfaces
and Fluid Borders
Scripted Sex: Jeannette Winterson’s Writing the Body (1993)
Beauty and the Beastly Gaze: Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin
Suicides (1993)
Winged Delights: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984)
Life Is a Freakshow: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989)
The Cyborg Body: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995)
Oedipus Trans*: Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under (2017)
Body as Multitude: Akwaeki Emezi’s Freshwater (2018)
5 Postmodern Families: Reimagining Kinship
Consuming Families: Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985)
Family as Talk-Story: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman
Warrior (1976)
Postmodern Matriarchy: Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993)
Family Curses and Geek Masculinity: Junot Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)
Kinship and Lost Time: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good
Squad (2010)
Indigenous Gothic, Sasquatch, and Community as Family:
Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000)
6 (meta)Histories: The Past as Present
Chained to History: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)
Of Butterfl ies and Dictators: Julia Alverez’s In the Time
of the Butterfl ies (1994)
Unstuck in Time: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
Neo-Hoodoo History: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
Challenging Dead-eye Dog: Leslie Silko’s Almanac
of the Dead (1999)
7 Re-Visions: Novels Rewriting Novels
Decolonizing the Literary Past: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso
Sea (1966)
Globalizing the Past: Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the
World (1993)
Sacred Revisions: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)
Re-envisioning the Postmodern University: A. S. Byatt’s
Possession (1990)
Dark Hearts: Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003)
Reds, Whites, and Reservation Blues: Sherman Alexie’s
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
8 True Lies: Nonfiction Novels and
Autofictions
Empire’s Tracks: Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980)
History as a Novel, the Novel as History: Norman Mailer’s
Armies of the Night (1968)
Historical Sideshow: Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia: A Book for
People Who Find Television Too Slow (1986)
Graphic Trauma: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986)
Crude Awakenings: Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018)
9 Displacements: Exiles, Diasporas,
and Returns
Foreigners in Their Own Land: Tommy Orange’s
There There (2018)
Migrant Doors of Reception: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017)
An Epidemic of Displacements: Rabih Alamenddine’s
Koolaids: Th e Art of War (1998)
Exiled to Home: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
(2013)
10 Futures? Digital Dangers and Climate
Crises
Multi-mediated Horror: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of
Leaves (2000)
Decoding Capitalism: Scarlett Th omas’s PopCo (2014)
Engendering the Future: Jeanette Winterson’s
Frankissstein (2019)
Afrojujuism: Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014)
Postcolonial Outer Space: Rosario Sanchez and Beatrice
Pita’s Lunar Braceros (2009)
Surveillance States, Biotech, and Climate Crises: Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
T.V. Reed is Buchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Washington State University, USA. His recent books include The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present (2019) and Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era (2019). Reed also curates the web matrix culturalpolitics.net.
Review :
T.V. Reed is a formidable champion, both theoretically and in the realm of textual or cultural analyses, for the centrality of the referential function of aesthetic postmodernism. His Bloombury Introduction to Postmodern Realist Fiction exemplifies such critical efforts through its masterful and compelling presentation of this unique but less often elucidated or theorized dimension of the postmodern interventionary politics. By the example of his surveys and discussions, Reed shows convincingly why postmodern realist fiction—a mode of aesthetic experimentalism emerging out of the mid-1960s—is a representational instrument ideally suited for engaging the vital concerns of America’s late capitalist culture, as well as for legitimizing subaltern struggles, voices, and aspirations.
