International Cooper Series in English Language and Literature – serie

America es una sola aunque pocos lo crean, un dia por encima del Pentagono y las bananas y el petr6leo los hombres comprenderan la imbecilidad incurable de los nacionalismos. Julio Cortazar Ultimo Round The essays collected in this volurne arose out of a workshop at the 1992 Conference of the European Association for American Studies in Seville. The overall theme of that conference was "The American Colurnbiad: 'Discovering' America, Inventing the United States. " Feel- ing somewhat ill at ease with the clarification of this theme in the EAAS Newsletter of October 1990, which explained that the "central concern" of the conference would be to study the "making of a country which is more than just a country, but also and quintessentially a dream, a fic- tion, a continuous creation ...", we decided to organize a workshop that would focus on literary texts which implicitly or explicitly stand in opposition to the concept that the making of the North American nation is "quintessentially a dream. " While for many representing a dream, the making of the American nation deferred and destroyed at the same time the dreams of many others.The texts that interested us would therefore be such as foreground the hegemonic and power-related aspects that that making entailed and entails. The title that we chose for our workshopwas "Deferring a Dream: Literary Sub-Versions of the American Colurnbiad. " The hyphen in sub- version is not entirely accidental.

The idea for this study came to me in the course of my reading of innova­ tive US-American! fiction of the last three decades. I observed that much of it is cast in the comic mode - or, more precisely, that there seems to be in contemporary fiction an affinity between 'innovation' and 'the comic' and that this affinity, furthermore, appears to be characteristic of postmo­ dernism. It is obvious, at the same time, that comic has become an elusive and, more often than not, a disputable category. Frederick Karl, in his sur­ vey of American Fictions 1940-1980, maintains, for instance, that much comic writing consists in ridicule that lacks deeper intellectual and cul­ tural roots. "Wit and mockery," he notes, "by themselves have little lasting value. Even in the best of such fiction, Gravity's Rainbow, one is made aware of attenuated skits stiched onto previous segments, rather than baked in by a defined point of view. " (Karl: 27) Such assessments of course challenge my view that the comic is in significant ways connected with what is innovative in postmodernist US-American fiction. Yet the term comic -or related terms like humour, parody, irony and so fort- is regularly and heavily employed in discussions or reviews of con­ temporary fiction.