Visionary Moment

Paul Maltby is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University. He is the author of Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon.

"What allows Maltby consistently to present familiar authors in a new light is a thoroughgoing knowledge of manifestations of the visionary moment from the classical sublime to varieties of Christian conversion narratives to Wordsworth and the Romantics to Joyce. Despite a surprising afterlife in contemporary fiction, these disembodied visions are unlikely to outlive Maltby's long-overdue postmodern critique." — Joseph Tabbi, coeditor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology"A feast for the intellect—Maltby parades one insightful observation after another, launching connections in unexpected directions and circling back to the main target of his 'postmodern critique.' His analysis foregrounds chiefly the 'ideological function' of visionarism, that is, the 'false consciousness' paradoxically induced during instances of 'illumination.' But Maltby is also aware that in cases such as Alice Walker's similar moments can activate a 'critical function.'" — Christian Moraru, author of Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Modalities of the Visionary Moment 2. Validations of the Visionary Moment 3. Metaphysics of the Visionary Moment 4. The Romantic Metaphysics of Don Delillio 5. Saul Bellow's Transfigurable Subjects 6. Jack Kerouac's Rhetoric of Time 7. Ideology of the Visionary Moment Conclusion Appendix: The Postmodern Sublime Notes Works Cited Index