Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature
Author(s): Mary K. Holland (Author)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication Date: 20 Jun. 2013
Language: English
Print length: 240 pages
ISBN-10: 9781441130617
ISBN-13: 1441130616
Book Description
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.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
Compelling first book … Holland presents a nuanced reading of contemporary literature’s departure from postmodernism. –Twentieth-Century Literature
A fine and close analysis of several American novels written in the twenty-first century allowed her to grasp in them a resistance to the disaffected solipsism bred by the post-cultural culture of mediation and simulation and to anchor late postmodern fiction in a long humanist tradition respectful of individuals and communities. –American Book Review
Holland gives readers a new map of the contemporary novel that registers the landscape with more precision than any earlier scholar-cartographer has managed. Her sequence of finely-grained readings synthesizes the insights of poststructuralism with the urgent impulse toward real meaning and value in twenty-first century fiction, to describe a mobius-strip realism that emerges out of the matter of fiction and that characterizes fiction that matters. –Stephen J. Burn, Northern Michigan University, USA
About the Author
Mary K. Holland is Assistant Professor of contemporary literature at The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA. Her work on irony and narcissism, poststructural realism, and mothering and media in fiction and film has appeared in Critique, The Journal of Popular Culture, and A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies.
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