Succeeding Postmodernism

Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature

Mary K. Holland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781628925340
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441121899
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Writing Postmodern Humanism
• 1 “Dead Souls Babbling”: Language, Loss, and Community in The Names and White Noise
• 2 “The Art’s Heart’s Purpose”: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of Infinite Jest
• 3 Recuperating the Postmodern Family: Mediating Loss in Music for Torching and House of Leaves
• 4 Joining Gravity: Making Language Matter in The Road, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and The Book of Portraiture
• 5 “Set . . . softly down beside you”: Poststructural Realism in “Octet” and Everything Is Illuminated
• Conclusion: Metamodernism
• Works Cited
• Index