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How Do We Interpret Contemporary U.S. Fiction?

Explore interpretive paths in U.S. fiction post-1989, including globalization theories, new themes, and post-9/11 changes. Analyze the impact of tragic realism, localism, and mimesis versus artifice on authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Alice Munro.

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How Do We Interpret Contemporary U.S. Fiction?

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  1. How Do We Interpret Contemporary U.S. Fiction? After 1989, when the Cold War ended After September 11, 2001

  2. Possible Interpretive Paths • Globalization Theories • Thematizing localities against global culture(s) • Jameson: late-cap. aesthetics are about space, not time. • New Others (to the U.S.) • Muslim Arabs as Racial Other • Nation (US) versus Network (Al Q’aeda, and also digital networks) • New Themes (in historical context) • Ecology, Biotechnology, Virtual Reality, Ethnicities, Sex & Gender Possibilities, Religion in Public Life • Postmodern Aesthetics and their Legacies

  3. What Happened to Postmodernism? • Guiding Question: • Are post-9/11 fictions different than what came before? If so, how? • Return to Mimetic and Artificial Forms • Jonathan Franzen/ Alice Munro/ Mimesis • David Foster Wallace/ Artifice

  4. Mimesis and Artifice Now: Franzen and the Social Novel “Perchance to Dream,” Harper’s April 1996 (Revised as & quoted here from “Why Bother,” How To Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2002. 55-97.) “At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between a feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, and to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved” (95). “Why am I bothering to write these books?” (73).

  5. “Tragic Realism” • “The necessary lie of every successful regime, including the upbeat techno-corporatism under which we now live, is that the regime has made the world a better place. Tragic realism preserves the recognition that improvement always comes at a cost. . . . Tragic Realism preserves access to the dirt behind the dream of Chosenness--to the human difficulty behind the technological ease, to the sorrow behind the pop-cultural narcosis: to all those portents on the margins of our existence” (92).

  6. Franzen:Fiction writers must represent our social-political-economic life, which is changing in ways that offer unique challenges to them (TV, Internet, publishing trends privileging “multiculturalism,” fiction programs encouraging cultural isolation). “History is the rabid thing from which we all . . . would like to hide. But there’s no bubble that can stay unburst. On whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, tragic realists offer no opinion. They simply represent it” (96-7).

  7. How can we use these ideas to interpret Munro’s stories? Tragic realism Localism Mimesis/Artifice Gender & Identity

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