As Wai-Chee Dimock puts it, what we call "American" is often a shorthand, a "simplified name for a much more complex tangle of relations" (3). The path of possible conflict is no longer running between the United States and Europe so much as between human enterprise, however that is described, and the unification of global human interests. Questions that would have been impossible to either ask or answer 30 years earlier have now become the staples of educated discourse. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once….".
Cyborgian existence, the malaise of a technology running rampant through nearly all fields of knowledge, shaped and re-shaped all intellectual pursuits, though as Donna Haraway continues to stress, "a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. Rather than being rooted in governmental policies, it stemmed from the deepest dichotomy possible: that of the human being set in opposition to the nonhuman. European opinion colored the critical reception of much United States writing.īy the later twentieth century, however, after the furor of the challenging 1960s rights movements in both race and gender, "politics" took on a much more inclusive definition. In literary circles, the bleak influence of European existentialism changed the priorities of, particularly, drama, but also led to worldwide recognition of such fiction writers as William Faulkner, Nelson Algren, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck. Early on, United States politics in regard to literature was a more limited reflection of European dissatisfactions, played out in the inevitable, and usually clamorous, battles of "left" and "right". Indeed, the whole concept of "politics" changes during the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet, Jameson continues, attempting to link forces with Lyotard, "The great master-narratives here are those that suggest that something beyond capitalism is possible, something radically different" (xix). narrative in some sense always meant the negation of capitalism" (xix).
In more specific political terms, according to Fredric Jameson, the pivotal assessment of contemporary narrative remains "how to do without narrative by means of narrative itself…. Some critics still categorize periodization in terms of technique, as when the contemporary (extending from the modern) is described as individual works "populating a highly variegated terrain" in order to "bring into contact manifold questions of language, gender, nation, ethnicity, form, history, and identity" (O'Donnell ix). The last five decades of the twentieth century are marked by frenetic activity in all realms of thought and actionand that frenzied activity does not lessen here in the twenty-first century. The periodization of this book is elastic: at times the concept of "contemporary" is defined as any period suffused with the need for survival ("Survival appears indeed both the secret and paramount obsession" of any contemporary, Hassan 2). Typically American in a search for new horizons (as in the vaunted frontier tradition), the story of post-World War II poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction captures the critics' desire to chart less-examined terrain. Most historiansliterary included-prefer the safety of agreement to the possible conflicts of controversy.Īssessing the United States literary world as it developed in the second half of the twentieth century, then, might seem to be a maverick's role, puckish at best, idiosyncratic at the extreme. And still another part occurs because of the academic nervousness about venturing in to the truly contemporary-that is, the untested, the still visible sites of disagreement, the expressly new. Part of this fascination is no doubt the comparative ease of finding and choosing materials for discussion part of it may be the visible adherence to the centuries of British literary prominence that existed well before the colonies separated themselves from the Mother Country. As historians survey the existence of American literature, they tend to concentrate on its earlier, formative years.
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