The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Shorter 7th ed. / Volume 2 / 2008

"American Literature since 1945"

(Pages 1129-1142)

REALISM

• "Regionalism could remain an interest, but only if it provided deeper meaning . . . "

• "Major dramatists behaved the same way; if their immediate predecessors had drawn on classically tragic allusions in deepening their themes, postwar playwrights embraced otherwise mundane characters as universal types; the death of a salesman, for example, would be examined in the same spotlight once reserved for great people, for here indeed was a figure who stood for the postwar human being."

• "As a genre poetry was less tied to expectations about realism or national essence than was the novel or the short story."

• "In the 1950s the poetic standard was the short lyric meditation, in which the poet, avoiding the first person, would find an object, a landscape, or an observed encounter that epitomized and clarified a feeling. A poem was the product of retrospection, a gesture of composure following the initial shock or stimulus that provided the occasion for writing."

• "As the novelist Philip Roth remarked in 1960, 'the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality.' Critical movements of the time articulated a new literary unease around the issue of realism, and writers responded to this unease by developing new literary strategies, ways of dealing with a much more contentious, varied, and unstable sense of the era. Some writers felt that social reality had become too unstable to serve as a reliable anchor for their narratives, and some critics believed that fiction had exhausted its formal possibilities. A 'Death of the Novel' controversy arose. Both the novel and the short story, some argued, demanded a set of fairly limited conventions; these conventions, such as characterization and development by means of dialogue, imagery, and symbolism, however, relied on a securely describable world to make sense."

• "Even as American life in the 1950s espoused conformity, technological advances in the exchange of information had made the particulars of such life ever more hard to manage. As boundaries of time and space were eclipsed by television, air travel, and an accompanying global awareness, the once essential unities of representation (time, space, and action) no longer provided ground on which to build a work of literary art. As more became known about the world, the writer's ability to make sense of the whole was challenged."

• "Literature in the 1960s, like many aspects of the decade, was often extreme in its methods and disruptive in its effects. . . . Writers continued to experiment with diverse practices in which to render a sense of contemporary reality, and they continued with artistic debates over how that reality was constituted and how it could be represented. Authors . . . continued to write realistic fiction, even in the heyday of Deconstruction, but in a style enriched by the rigorous cross-examination of its previously unquestioned practices."

• "Even in a period at times overly conscious of self and world as fictional constructs, poets . . . engaged with history and politics, and others . . . remained committed to poetry's relation to a common world."

• "In prose fiction a new group of realistic writers, called 'Minimalists,' made these challenges central to their work, crafting a manner of description that with great intensity limited itself to what could be most reliably accepted. What the Minimalists described was not endorsed by the authors as true; rather it consisted of signs that their characters accepted as truth, not objects from nature but conventions accepted by societies to go about the business of living. In a typically Minimalist story, although nothing sad is mentioned and no character grieves, someone makes a sign that she is saying something meant to be sad, and another character emits a perfect sign of being deeply unhappy in response. Objects that abound in such works are drawn from the consumer's world not for what they are but for what they signify, be it good taste or poor, wealth or deprivation. It is a capable way of writing realism in a world where philosophical definitions discourage such a term."

MODERNISM

• 1914-1945

• See pages 705-720

• " . . . so writers sought to capitalize on the successes of a previous literary generation."

• "As, earlier, the modernists had reached out to traditions beyond the Western . . . American writers of this period were redefining what constitutes America."

POST-MODERNISM

• "Postwar existence revealed different kinds of men and women, with new aspirations among both majority and minority populations. New possibilities for action empowered individuals and groups in the pursuit of personal freedom and individual self-expression."

• "Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, social critics perceived a stable conformity to American life, a dedication to an increasingly materialistic standard of living, whose ethical merit was ensured by a continuity with the prewar world--a continuity that proved to be delusory."

• "The passage from the 1950s to the 1960s marks the great watershed of the postwar half century. Conflicts between conformity and individuality, tradition and innovation, stability and disruption were announced and anticipated even before they effectively influenced history and culture."

• "Conflicts between conformity and individuality, tradition and innovation, stability and disruption characterized the literature of the period as they also shaped the historical and cultural milieu."

• "Cultural homogeneity was an ideal during the 1950s, patriotically so in terms of building up the foundations of American society to resist and contain Communism, materialistically so when it came to enjoying the benefits of Capitalism."

• "This ideal of homogeneity led many writers to assume that a singe work--short story, novel, poem, or play--could represent the experiences of an entire people, that a common national essence lay beneath distinctions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or region."

• "The literary world between 1945 and the Sixties often let readers believe that there could be such a thing as a representative American short story . . . "

• "Novels of the immediate postwar period followed this trend in more depth, in larger scale, and with more self-conscious justification. . . . Hence the desire to write what was called 'the great American novel,' a major work that would characterize the larger aspects of experience."

• "Despite this increase in poetry's visibility, its marginal position in the nation's culture, when compared to that of prose fiction, may have allowed for more divergence from the ideal of homogeneity."

• Poetry of the 1940s: " . . . evocation of African American experience . . . mystical and homosexual themes . . . linguistically experimental sequence . . . a unit of poetic expression based not on predetermined metrical feet but on the poet's 'breath' and the rhythms of the body."

• Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s: " . . . 'the longing to lose the gift of order, despoiling the self of all that had been, merely, propriety.'"

• "Like the notion of cultural conformity, the understanding of any single piece of literature as representing an entire people came under serious scrutiny during the 1960s."

• "With its open, experimental form and strong oral emphasis, Howl sounded a departure from the well-shaped lyric."

• "Literature in the 1960s, like many aspects of the decade, was often extreme in its methods and disruptive in its effects. . . . Writers continued to experiment with diverse practices . . . "

• "Metafictive"

• "Metapoetic"

• " . . . subgenres such as fantasy and science fiction . . . "

• "Contemporary literature values heterogeneity in forms and language, pluralism in cultural influences. This literature assumes a context wherein the nature of reality changes. Among this literature's emblems is the Internet, in which multiple realities--including those of different cultures and different identities--virtually coexist."

• "It has been said that our contemporary culture provides the greatest variety of literary expression available at any one time. From a war effort that demanded unity of purpose and a Cold War period that for a time encouraged conformity to a homogenetic ideal, American writing has emerged in the twenty-first century to include a sophisticated mastery of technique broadened by an understanding of literature's role in characterizing reality, whether that reality is understood as transcendental and visionary or as rooted in the ephemeral. One thing distinguishing these works as contemporary is that two different understandings of reality are not unified or reconciled . . . "

• "A hallmark of the postwar period is its shift from unity to diversity as an ideal, and during this time American writing has been characterized by a great variety of styles employed simultaneously. If anything is common to the period, it is an appreciation of and sometimes outright delight in language as a tool of literary expression. In a wide variety of ways, writers explore and test the ways language shapes our perceptions of reality, and their work moves in and out of various kinds of language, as if testing the limits and possibilities of the different discourses that make up contemporary life. This energetic investigation of language fuels a new inclusiveness and invigorates imaginative potential. Contemporary literature has survived the threats of its death to flourish in ways our writers are still imagining."

BEAT GENERATION

• Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956)

• "Ginsberg first delivered his poem aloud, during a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in the fall of 1955; the following year it was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookshop. In a single stroke, with the energy of a reborn Walt Whitman, Ginsberg made poetry one of the rallying points for underground protest and prophetic denunciation of the prosperous, complacent, gray-spirited Eisenhower years. The setting in which the poem appeared is also significant, for Howl, like other work associated with what came to be known as the San Francisco Renaissance, challenged the conventions of a literary tradition dominated by the East Coast. With its open, experimental form and strong oral emphasis, Howl sounded a departure from the well-shaped lyric."

PROTEST POETRY

• "In a single stroke, with the energy of a reborn Walt Whitman, Ginsberg made poetry one of the rallying points for underground protest and prophetic denunciation of the prosperous, complacent, gray-spirited Eisenhower years."

• "Social and political changes of the 1960s left a legacy even richer than those of critical and philosophical revolutions. Political protests helped make available to literature a broad range of more insistent voices."

• "Civil rights activism helped create the Black Arts Movement, which in turn replaced the notion of accepting only one one token African American writer at a time with a much broader awareness of imaginative expression by a wide range of literary talent."

• Southern writers

• Jewish American writers

• Women writers

• Native American writers

CONFESSIONAL POETRY

• Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959)

• "But with Life Studies he too challenged the literary status quo, bringing a new directness and autobiographical intensity into American poetry as he exposed the psychological turbulence suffered by an inbred New Englander. Lowell's movement into a more open, less heavily symbolic style was inspired, in part, by hearing the work of Ginsberg and others while on a reading tour of the West Coast."

• "In the 1960s poets began to extend their subject matter to more explicit and extreme areas of autobiography--sex, divorce, alcoholism, insanity. The convenient but not very precise label 'confessional' came to be attached to certain books in which the immediate particulars of one person's life insisted on the distinctness of individual experience, not its representativeness. Other poets devised forms that reflected an understanding of poetry as provisional, as representing the changing flow of experience from moment to moment. Some poets began dating each of their poems, as though to suggest that the feelings involved were subject to revision by later experience."

DECONSTRUCTION

• "A parallel development in literary theory posed another great threat to conventional literature. Known as 'Deconstruction' and brought to American shores from France by means of a series of university conferences and academic publications beginning in 1966, this style of criticism questioned the underlying assumptions behind any statement, exposing how what was accepted as absolute truth usually depended on rhetoric rather than fact, exposing indeed how 'fact' itself was constructed by intellectual operations. This style of criticism became attractive to literary scholars who had been framing social and political questions in much the same terms . . . "

• "Deconstruction's preoccupation with language dismantled some of the boundaries between philosophy, poetry, psychology, and linguistics, and emphasized writing as a site of multiple discourses. The idea of literature as self-expression was complicated by a focus on the social power of language and the constructed nature of subjectivity. The skepticism toward unity and coherence that marks the era extended to the very idea of the self. The Death of the Novel debates in prose fiction had an analogue in the intensified skepticism poets brought to the idea of narrative. Borrowing from the technologies of film and video (jump cuts, tracking shots, shifting camera angles, split screens), literature began to imagine a reader saturated with the sounds of contemporary discourse, a reader whose attention quickly shifts. All of these impulses converged to destabilize literary genres that were once thought to be reliable windows on the world."

CULTURAL DIVERSITY

• "Civil rights activism helped create the Black Arts Movement, which in turn replaced the notion of accepting only one one token African American writer at a time with a much broader awareness of imaginative expression by a wide range of literary talent."

• Southern writers

• Jewish American writers

• Women writers

• Native American writers

• " . . . in the 1970s and 1980s a fresh impetus of experimentation and literary commitment came from writers of minority traditions who gained access to presses and publications. Available now were artistic expressions of the cultural complexity of the American population from Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and other groups previously excluded from the literary canon. These different traditions are not mutually exclusive; the work of many writers testified to an enlivening interaction between traditions, affirming the imagination's freedom to draw from many sources."

• "One of the most dramatic developments, one that indicated the much broadening range of achievement among writers of many different backgrounds and persuasions, was the success of African American women--novelists, dramatists, and poets--during the 1970s and 1980s in finding literary voices and making them heard as important articulations of experience. Here was a reminder of how so much of what passes for reality is nothing but artifice, fabrication, and convention--for here was a large group of people whose ancestors had been written out of history and who were still often denied speaking parts in national dialogues. Even with so much of a usable past effaced and identity repressed, these writers were able to find a means of expression that helped redefine readers' understanding of the world . . . "

• "By the close of the twentieth century other voices emerged that also had been written out of history, and many writers from minority traditions began to take their place at the center of American writing. 'Realism,' like 'globalism,' was now a much more expansive and inclusive term . . . "

SUMMARY: A LIST OF LITERARY TRAITS / CHARACTERISTICS OF "POST-MODERNISM"

1.) Questions reality. Poetry less tied to expectations about realism than fiction.

2.) New literary strategies invented to deal with questions of unstable reality. "Death of the Novel." The standard conventions (such as characterization, plot, symbolism, etc.) and the standard "unities" (time, space, and action) are no longer stable.

3.) New practices were experimental and diverse, extreme and disruptive.

4.) New practices questioned old practices. "Metafiction" (fiction about fiction) and "Metapoetry" (poems about poetry).

5.) At times overly conscious of self and world as fictional constructs.  Fiction tended to more self-conscious justification.

6.) Minimalism.

7.) Redefining what constitutes "America."

8.) Pursuing personal freedom and individual self-expression.

9.) Shifts FROM "conformity" and "homogeneity" TO "individuality" and "heterogeneity" and "diversity."

10.) More of a focus on language as a tool of literary expression, of how language shapes our perceptions of reality.

11.) Subject matter extended to more explicit and extreme areas of autobiography.

12.) Deconstructionism.

13.) Literature began to imagine a reader saturated with the sounds of contemporary discourse, a reader whose attention quickly shifts.  Strategies "invented" to address this.

14.) "Multi-genre" literature -- e.g., poems within novels, poems within nonfiction, blending fiction and nonfiction, visual elements, cinematographic elements, etc.