Tag: postmodern

Lila Marz Harper shows the many dimensions of intertextuality between Edwin Abbott's Flatland and Steve Tomasula's VAS. From typography to narratology, Tomasula's "opera in flatland" follows Abbott, in a geometry of fiction that interrogates the biopolitics of today.

Dennis Cooper's disorienting novel, The Sluts, complicates reader expectations about subjectivity and identity. As a result, Megan Milks notes that it "is either the most honest or the most dishonest literature I have come across."

In The American Epic Novel, Gilbert Adair presents a "State-of-the-Empire address" that interrogates the epical form in a time where authors no longer talk of writing "The Great American Novel." As Joseph Tabbi finds, such an exploration goes beyond expanding the canon and presents "a new, compelling context for 'the literary' itself."

Richard Kalich's latest protagonist is Richard Kalich, but one critic views this postmodern occupation of the novel as an opportunity - even an encouragement - to forget about him.

Contrasting Lynne Tillman's text with the "complicitous critique" of Donald Barthelme and other postmodern ironists, Sue-Im Lee argues that Tillman's narration displays the "mobility" of Adornian cultural criticism, in which contradiction is not a problem but a mode of interrogating the present.

"Dispersion" is a short-story by Rob Swigart.

Michael Boyden reflects on the stubborn and idiosyncratic fiction of Harry Mathews and introduces a new ebr gathering of work on and by Mathews.

"The plot offers not so much progress as recurrence, duplication, and reiteration." Flore Chevaillier offers one way to fill in the gaps of Joseph McElroy "Canoe Repair."

Julie Cupples reviews a retrospective collection of essays by Chandra Mohanty on the geopolitics of gender and race.

Late Breaking: William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Rob Wittig post from Notre Dame University on the &Now festival of writers and writing.