American Postmodernism Message Board

So, let me see what worthy authors you are hiding in your libraries.

I wonder what three of us owning the DSM-IV says about postmoderism?

And I own so many DSM-IV 'support books' (quick reference, etc). :P

I also enjoy all the copies of Lolita floating around this group.

Don't you think DF Wallace aligns himself against post-modernism? See, for instance, the essay "E Unibus Pluram" or the stories "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" or "My Appearance".

I don't think the postmodern novel exists. Nothing written in the past 30 years is as experimental or self-referential or fractured as Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy. The novel was born free and the greatest novels have always played with form. That's not to criticize contemporary novelists, I think Pynchon, Wallace, Gaddis, DeLillo, Roth and others have rescued the novel when TV and film have tried to kill it off and high modernism reached a creative terminus with Joyce and Beckett. There is an after-modernism movement in fiction, but it shouldn't be confused with the postmodernism in other art forms like architecture and painting. The novel has never needed to be set free.

danconley: Hear, hear! I'd just add Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus to the list of early novels that exhibit the characteristics we now associate with postmodernism.

I agree with #5, postmodernism is not a literary movement, but it is a motif. Often what is termed PM is mostly just "pain in the ass to read" or "seeped in self assured irony".

I have the DSM-IV Revised. I take it to family reunions, "just in case."

That's funny enough that I can imagine Steven Wright or someone like him delivering it!

9>

My vocalized deliveries have been compared to Steven Wright on several occasions.

Thanksfully, I am not like that all of the time.

;)