The Dialectic of Self and Story: Reading and Storytelling in Contemporary American Fiction (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, historical dislocation, and authorial self-reflexiveness. In individual chapters on Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich and a chapter on selected novelists of the Vietnam War, this book explores how the apparent social realism of this fiction betrays equally persistent concerns with literary representation and experimentalism. The subtle but discernible emphasis in this fiction on narrative voice and authorial inventions creates a realist/postmodernist fusion which enhances these writers' visions of contemporary life. While noting the frequency with which these writers depict characters as actual or symbolic authors and readers, this study suggests that these postmodern works, for all their self-reflexiveness, so take on a mediating relationship to the world. The central characters in these texts are themselves storytellers and readers, whose stories at once connect up to the world of experience and throw us back on the problematics of storytelling.