Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction – serie

Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison''s influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers.For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

Alicia Borinsky argues that the contemporary Latin American novel does not just ingeniously dismantle the referential claims of the more traditional novel; it offers a postmodern version of the lessons taught by fiction.Latin American fiction, perhaps the most inventive literature of recent decades, seems marked by its self-reflexivity, by its playful relationship to history and the everyday, and by its concerns with the ways in which language works. But is it, Borinsky asks, really a literature whose primary goal is to raise metafictional questions about writing and reading? While the effects of this literature include dismantling the illusions of realism, naturalism, and historicism, the haunting and disturbing energy of its major works lies in their capacity of invoke a region beyond literature through literature.Theoretical Fables progresses by way of close readings of the works of eight canonical—and not quite canonical—Latin American Authors. Borinsky argues that the Latin American "theoretical fable" has its origins in the work of the early twentieth-century Argentinean writer Macedonio Fernández. In this light she studies the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Adolfo Bioy Cesares, Manuel Puig, and Maria Luisa Bombal.

Silvio Gaggi''s survey of the vast terrain of twentieth century arts and ideas is unique not only for its scope but also for the clarity and cohesiveness it brings to wide-ranging, seemingly disparate works. By identifying underlying epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical issues. Gaggi draws connections among such modern and postmodern masterpieces as Pirandello''s and Brecht''s theater, Fowles''s and Barth''s fiction, Warhol''s paintings, Godard''s and Bergman''s films, and Derrida''s literary theory.Modern/Postmodern begins with a discussion of the profound skepticism—about traditional beliefs and about our ability to know the self—that lies at the heart of both modernism and postmodernism. Gaggi identifies the modernist response to this doubt as the rejection of mimesis in favor of a purely formalistic or expressionistic art. The postmodern response, on the other hand, is above all to create art that is self-referential (concerned with art itself, the history of art, or its processes). Drawing from the work of Piranadello and Brecht, paradigms that can be applies to many different art works, Gaggi emphasizes how these works from diverse media relate to one another and what their relationships are to the contemporary artistic and philosophical climate. He concentrates on the works themselves, but examines theory as a parallel manifestation of the same obsessions that inform recent literature and art.Gaggi asks, finally, if self-referential art can also be politically and ethically engaged with the reality outside it. He concludes that the postmodern obsession with language, narrativity, and artifice is not necessarily a decadent indulgence but is, at its best, an honest inquiry into the problems, questions, and paradoxes of language.Modern/Postmodern is a lively approach to postmodern art that will interest all students and scholars of contemporary art and literature.