On endings
Subtitle: American postmodern fiction and the Cold War
By: Daniel Grausam
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780813931616; 9780813931623; 9780813931661
Subjects: Cold War; Theory; Postmodernism (Literature); Influence; History and criticism; Criticism and interpretation; American fiction; Cold War in literature
Description: What does narrative look like when the possibility of an expansive future has been called into question? This query is the driving force behind Daniel Grausam's On Endings, which seeks to show how the core texts of American postmodernism are a response to the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and especially to the new potential for total nuclear conflict. Postwar American fiction needs to be rethought, he argues, by highlighting postmodern experimentation as a mode of profound historical consciousness. On Endings significantly extends the project of historicizing postmodernism while returning the nuclear to a central place in the study of the Cold War.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Institutionalizing postmodernism: John Barth and modern war; title: The Crying of Lot 49, circa 1642; or, Pynchon, periodicity, and total war; title: The time of the nation, the time of the state; title: Unthinking the thinkability of the unthinkable; title: Trying to understand end zone; title: The dominant tense: Richard Powers and late postmodernism.