Postmodern Fiction: A New Syllabus

Here is the matter: I’m digging up the dead here. “Postmodernism,” as a name and nothing else, has been a corpse beneath the floorboards of literary studies: a repository stench to which critics can consign a near-century in the history of style. “Postmodern fiction,” as a label so reified and repeated so as to become meaningless, is but a yawning blank. Our fiction deserves better. Our students deserve better. Our fiction deserves critical nomenclature that honors the undeniable life of its styles. Our students deserve a literary education free of empty givens. 

 

The fundamental emptiness of “postmodern fiction” has something to do with its tired temporality. The moment we define a genre solely through its temporal relation to its predecessors, we drain said genre of all peculiarity and specificity, thus marking an entire chapter in the history of art with a negative signifier. The adjective “postmodern” serves only to create a closed dialectical system that, despite all presumptions, cannot resolve into forward-movement. We cannot imagine what our present literature truly signifies until we entirely do away with “postmodern” as a constitutive literary category. 

 

We must also contend with the internal fallacies of temporality within “postmodern fiction.” After all, we find the images of Pynchonian slapstick and meta-authorial irony in The Canterbury Tales. We can read The Divine Comedy as autofiction. Is there a novel more profoundly concerned with the relativization of truth than Don Quixote? Those stylistic markers of “postmodern fiction” which have come to be so centrally associated with the genre so as to become near-metonymic,  have been with us since the earliest days of Western literature. Therefore what we call “postmodern fiction” can’t be crucified on a cross of this design. 

 

Perhaps the greatest fallacy of all, that regime-of-presumption most responsible for the anemic criticism surrounding 20th-century fiction, is the conflation of anti-foundationalist thinking with insincerity. I’m not foolish enough to deny that the post-Victorian era is peculiarly marked by a general relativization of truth-claims. But to presume that fiction writers representing said relativization are, by virtue of representing the absence of capital-T Truth, fundamentally insincere–or playing for jokes–is an equally foolish claim. Any distinction drawn between Modernism’s “parody” and Postmodernism’s “pastiche” is flawed: every piece of fiction is grounded in a moral certainty of some kind: even if it is only the certainty that there is no moral ground at all. There are no nihilists here. All fiction is sincere.

 

As we navigate literature’s present moment–what some have called, in the wake of David Foster Wallace, the “New Sincerity” in rightful if imperfect lieu of “post-postmodernism”–critics and teachers require greater clarity and specificity regarding the genre-markers of 20th-century fiction. Literary history, while not sufficient to serve as sole source of critical nomenclature, remains necessary to communities of literary critique and pedagogy. I believe our students can benefit from an education in 20th-century fiction that is not only less contingent upon nomenclatures bereft of any dynamic meaning but firmly rooted in the organization of works based on common style. This will require a splintering of “postmodern fiction” into more distinct categories. 

 

So here’s a reading list separated into more useful critical categories (developed with my wife, la miglior fabbra, Elle Corbin), having some correlation with historicity but, ultimately, having more to do with the necessary and often overlooked chiasms between themes and forms: namely, how sincere moral concerns manifest as style. I don’t enjoy all of these works. Some of them are complete aesthetic failures, even by the standards of the categories in which they’ve been placed. This list is also not exhaustive. But each selection represents an attempt to map the contours of some contemporary life through the sublimation of sincere moral inquiry into peculiar literary style. 

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Atomic Fiction

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double entendre: both the bomb and social atomization; depiction of loneliness without a necessary attempt to resolve loneliness; incipient autofiction or “I-Novel”; science fiction; intellectualization; metasystemization; meta-artistic; diegetic authorial presence; parapolitics; scientific aesthetics (i.e., New Critics)

 

Paul Auster, Leviathan

J. G. Ballard, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Andrei Bitov, Apothecary Island

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

Jorge Luis Borges, House of Astarion

Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Don DeLillo, Libra

Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Joan Didion, The White Album

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

William Gaddis, J R

William Gass, The Tunnel

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

Andrei Platonov, The Fierce and Beautiful World

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Han Sorya, Jackals

Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

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Pharmaceutical Fiction

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naturalization of pharmaceuticals; prescriptive communities; communities of loneliness; pop psychology; carceral domesticity; carceral medicine; overt violence; flat affect; sexual violence and violent sexuality; critique of pedagogy; quotidian paranoia; speculative dystopia; the oppressive commercial forces of everyday life

 

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

J. G. Ballard, Crash

Donald Barthelme, Shower of Gold

Ivan Bunin, Dark Avenues

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver, So Much Water So Close to Home

Robert Coover, The Babysitter

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Philip K. Dick, Ubik

Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Denis Johnson, Car Crash While Hitchhiking

Sarah Kane, Blasted

Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West

Yukio Mishima, Kyoko’s House

Ryu Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue

Ryu Murakami, Audition

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Charu Nivedita, Zero Degree

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Cho Se-hui, The Dwarf

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

 

 

 

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Immanent/Transcendent Fiction

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absence of communities; slippery pronouns; merging of narrators; quasi-religious ego death; quotidian body horror; synthesis of human and nonhuman; sublimation of societal ills into spiritual transcendence; author-character as total consciousness; romance as mutual erasure; god by other names

 

Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Sean Thor Conroe, Fuccboi

Julio Cortázar, Axolotl

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Karl Ove Knaussgard, My Struggle

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Ryu Murakami, Piercing

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Flannery O’Connor, Enoch and the Gorilla

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

David Foster Wallace, A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life

David Foster Wallace, Forever Overhead

Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch