-
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady; high realism;believes bestfiction is realism, defined flexibly; writers have responsibility ofsincerity & moral depth; long sentences and deeply psychological -
E.M. Forster
Howards End; Passage to India, character psychology, sensitive portrayals of relationships; talks about flat and round characters -
James Joyce
Dubliners: carefully constructed ambiguities. Precise, movement-packed character descriptions. Walks. A midpoint moment of intensity, followed by "reveal." A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; --deep psychological realism. Form matching content. Repetition of words, motifs. Ulysses; master atspacial forms; at multiperson narration; Themes - death, ability to love, superiority complex, reconstructing Irish race. -
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway ; character psychology,stream ofconsciousness; sees herself as part of a new generation of modernwriters more attentive to character, human nature–recognizes thelimits of human perception -
Jorge Luis Borges
Argentian magical realist short-story writer, essayist, poet; Ficciones,The Aleph; in his short-story "Fumes the Memorius" reader bothwants to doubt and believe the magic; preoccupation with humanabilities and limitations -
Jean Paul Sartre
What is Literature -
Eugene Ionesco
The Bald Soprano; also wrote fiction - "The Rhinoceros" ; skillfully gives us digressions that later turn out tobe relevent; logic at first is ridiculous, then becomes accepted byreader -
Michel Butor
French fiction-writer and critic; wrote "Welcome to Utah" - fictional lyric essay; great example of a spacial form -
Ann Quin
English writer with experimental style; "Motherlogue" --records mother speaking to child on the phone, no punctuation -
Wayne Booth
American critic; in "Distance and Point of View: An Essay inClassification" calls attention to the privileging of showing abovetelling, of ambiguity and irony in modern literature, and wants todevelop a more precise system of categories to study the effects of POV. Discusses implied authors, comes up with the term unreliable narrator, as well as the terms dramatized and undramatized narrator -
Alaine Robbe-Grillet
film maker, author, critic. "In the Cooridors " - about the escalator ; believes age of character has passed -
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
100 Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera. Called himself a realist but considered founding father of magical realism -
Julio Cortazar
Read: Blow Up and Other Stories. We Love Glenda. Change of Light. Argentinian short-story writer; considered founder of El Boom movement in Latin America; in his short-story "Blow Up" language becomes object, incredible example of a chilling metalepsis effect; very leftist politics -
John Barth
Lost in the Funhouse (short story collection); short-story "Life Story" is typical metaliterary writing; in "The Literature of Replenishment" defined postmodernism as an answer to the contradiction between pre-modern realism and modernism. It adopts realism's populism but without realism's claims to objectivity. -
William Gass
In The Heart of the Heart of the Country; read the rest of this collection and On Being Blue. Metalypsis; defamiliarization; structured by category; multiple meanings existing at once; poignant analysis of characters; creates reality then violates that reality through contradiction -
Robert Coover
Brown Prof. Emeritus; postmodern short story writer; the Babysitter (1969); "The Pedestrian Accident" -
Leonard Michaels
Jewish New York writer; in his story "City Boy" skillfully constructs anunreliable (likeably unlikeable) narrator -
Donald Barthelme
postmodern story-writer; "The School" , "Game": incredibly skillfulendings, layers of surprise. Gradually violate realism but maiintainemotional potency. Great examples of treating reader as partner inthe game--not condescending. -
Roland Barthe
French structuralist and post-structuralist ; writes that realismestablishes its claim to reality through speech-acts serving nofunction; writes of Hermeneutic code and proairetic code (code ofenigmas and code of actions); plot as code of actions structuring codeof enigmas -
Joseph Frank
Biographer, critic; writes about "spacial form" in Flaubert, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Proust, and Djuna Barnes. Flaubert depicts several scenes simultaneously; Joyce uses references that only become meaningful through constant return; Proust allows us to experience time spacially by juxtaposing image of someone in the past with image of someone now -
Raymond Carver
American ; famous short-story writer (in collaboration with Lish) -
Joy Williams
The Changling (short story collection). Quick and the Dead (most recent). Honored Guest. image saturation and brilliant metaphors, sentence level ambiguity -
Salman Rushdie
MIdnight's Children; magical realist post-colonial -
Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"
2nd person narration? Note that Kincaid is interested in the use of 2nd person narration with a racial consciousness that challenge the idea of universality -
Jose Saramago
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis; great example of magical realism -
Joyce Carol Oates
Read: BLackwater. and Because It's Bitter, Because It was my Heart. Or Evil Eye (noir-like novellas of love gone wrong). Corn Maiden. American realist; politicizing , racializing; high school girls, privilege; in "How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of correction and Began my Life Again" plays with multiple narration; skilfully introduces enough ambiguous elements to draw us onward; use of italics and spacial gaps -
Seymour Chapman
Structuralist; narrative theorist; discusses narratives as composed of story and Discourse. Writer / Implied Author / Narrator / Narrattee / Implied Reader / Reader. Poses that all narrators exists on a spectrum somewhere between being an implied author (who cannot really see, can only conceive) and a character (who sees) The narrator; believes writers cannot be blamed for the politics of their implied authors -
Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son
unreliable narrator--because he's a junky! Disassociation combined with sudden (unpredictable) emotional intensity -
Peter Brooks
American critic ; advocates that we do not dismiss plot; plot as"structuring operation" that mediate's a problem through events insuccession. Distinguishes between Fabula (order of events) andSjuzet (order of narrative); plot as a way of coping with mortality -
Wendy Faris
writes about magical realism as an important subset of postmodern writing; stems from rejection of realism. Moreconcerned with questions of being (ontological); contains element of magic - could be a cause and effect sequence that doesn't make sense; political and populist; language itself becomes an object; story-within-story structure calls attention to generative power of language; touching of living/dead world; anti-totalitarian, child-like -
Gary Lutz's "Stories in the Worst Way"
essential New Prose: defamilialirization, highly conceptual about himself narrowing into particular details, confused relationship to his own story; -
David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest; calls for new age past-Irony in E Eunibus Pluram; new Prose signal writer -
Ursula Heise's Chronoschisms
writes that modernists are interested in studying the subjective experience of time; postmodernists unravel notions of time using Repetition, Metalepsis and Recursion (story within a story), and Experimental typographies (and pastiching---celebrates simultaneity). postmodernism doesn't propose a future; instead it is focused on the unknowability of present and past. -
Steven Millhauser's "The Knife Thrower and Other Short Stories"
1st person plural; fabulist?--likes to write about carnivals -
Norman Rush
American; wrote a lot about Botswana in the 80s; his short-story"Lying Presences" about the brother who believes in Aliens containsa very tight, arched structure -
Victor Pelevin
Russian fiction writer, with postmodern and sci-fi elements; obsessedwith insects; metamorphisis, magical realism as allegory -
Mary-Beth Hughes
New York writer ; writes about passivity, artists; the threat of moralbankrupcy always lingering ; incredible characterization, short andinformation-packed prose; I would say she fits into New Prose signalcamp -
James Wood
New Yorker writer; in "What Can Metaphors Do" writes that an effective metaphor draws upon an unexpected realm but yet feels natural, a type of association this character or this narrator might make; writes on the importance of movement and surprise to good character creation; writes successful metafiction makes reader want to believe in world while underminingreader's own reality -
Lydia Davis
short-story writer; translator of french -
Sven Birkerts's "A New Prose Signal"
describes a new genre of postmodernism characterized by black humor, defamilizarization, numb disassociation from the fantastical/horrific: includes writers such as Gary Lutz, George Saunders, Ben Marcus, Colson Whitehead, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Curtis White, Aleksandar Hemon -
Jonathan Updike
known for realism; writing about religion/sexuality/family crisis in the small Protestant American town; yet "The Widow" is in the form of a Q&A with a philosophical interlude? -
George Saunders
American short-story and novella writer; incorporates fantasy andmagic; Tenth of December; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline ;Pastoralia -
Ben Marcus's "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing"
Postmodern writer; critique of Franzen; stands up for experimental literature -
Brian Richardson's Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction
types of postmodern narration: narrative transformations (goes from one type to another); standard/hypothetical/autotelic 2nd person narration (2nd person is instable, oscillating between 1st and 3rd); "You" can raise issues of oppression, satirize dominating voices; "we" often used by postcolonial writers--can vary in its violation of realism; Interlucutor (asks questions); Denarration; The Permeable Narrator (narrative voices violate boundaries of story world) -
Melinda Davis's "Fractals Bifurcations, Intermittencies and Periodicities, Folded-Towel Diffeomorphisms, Strange Attractors, Smooth-Noodle Maps, Accelerators, REcursions and Songs of the Sea"
metaliterary; goes all the way with footnotes! -
Matt Bell
In "Ten Scenes," narrator's abilit to retell what happenned allows new solutions ; philosophical interlude -
Susan Straight - Between Heaven and Here
Imaginative postmodern novelist writing about African Americans moving from Louisiana to California; political -
Mary Robinson
Read: Why Did I ever. Tell Me. Subtraction is most well known. "likely Lake" - psychological story from POV of widower; considered minimalist, considered to be part of New Prose Signal group -
JD Daniels
JD Daniels - Paris Review story - man's jaded monologue. Continuously fosters new ways of expressing that jadedness. Subtly creates a system of symbology. Moments of horror go unresolved. Episodic. -
Zadie Smith
"Big Week" - ambiguity in the beginning. Subtly building patterns. Speech contradicting thought. Little details give us a sense of other characters' responses to main character's thoughts. Switch to wife's perspective illuminates sadness of inevitable human disconnect, difference in needs. -
Jess Walter
in N+1 story writes about a Boone town where "gentrification becomes stale jokes." : run-ons, types turning into in-depth characters. Language as physical object; "Chill up here in the Boone" becomes poignant over time. ultimately focused on the relationship between two characters.