Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

As this chapter approaches the coverage of nearly a half century of literary and critical activity, its earlier reaches take on a sense of historical stability. The first three decades now seem to be the easiest to characterize: the 1960s for sociopolitics, the 1970s for feminism, and the 1980s for multiculturalism. Without these three major axes of change, such notions as "postmodernism" and a revitalized interest in literary theory would be untethered ideas, if not relatively baseless concerns. Increasingly scholars are attending to the groundwork done by fiction writers 30 and more years ago—as a prolegomena perhaps to understanding the new age coming into being in the wake of the millennium and the September 11 attacks, both of which they have on their minds.

i General Studies

Utopia Limited and Risking Difference are not just apt titles; they can also serve as attitude markers for how the brightest critics now view those great cultural changes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Subtitles tell part of each story. Marianne DeKoven's book (published by Duke) treats "The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern," while Jean Wyatt's study (SUNY) addresses "Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism." At the start of Utopia Limited DeKoven admits that the events of September 2001 changed her view My thanks to Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz for help with the research for this essay. (and everyone else's) of the 1960s. Violence, for example, could no longer be considered winsomely supportive of peace, while antiwar sentiments became less fashionable. From this perspective her 1960s are seen as a transitional period in which the "grandly synthesizing utopian master narratives of modernity" culminate, to be replaced by postmodernism's "post-utopian, multiply diffuse ('diverse'), egalitarian-populist, thoroughly commercial order, which is precisely post-modernity, not non-modernity." DeKoven builds her argument on Herbert Marcuse, Roland Barthes, and Fredric Jameson; her favorite literary critic is Ihab Hassan. Cultural icons are studied through their writerly treatment—Las Vegas by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Vietnam by Francis FitzGerald, the women's movement (as opposed to feminism per se) by Robin Morgan. In terms of fiction DeKoven's most interesting analysis is how literary experimentalism came to a fork in the road during this period. One group, characterized by John Barth, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, and Ronald Sukenick, "assimilated popular culture to the oppositional code of the avant-garde, rather than entering into its force field completely, as postmodern writing does." As such, this writing marks "an endpoint of modernism." A different path is taken by authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, who "shift toward refunctioned conventional, subgeneric modes, and forms of the popular." These latter figures "survived the end of the sixties and moved into postmodern prominence."

What DeKoven recalls as a fond hope—that the best ideals of the 1960s would be realized by feminism—is given a thorough examination by Jean Wyatt. Her Risking Difference focuses more directly on selected writers and specific texts, notably novels that served as empowering voices for feminists, African American women, and Chicana writers. Together these authors form a multicultural feminist community, but Wyatt is especially interested in a Lacanian approach to the individual psychic processes of identification that at once form and are formed by social discourses of race, class, and culture. "Identification in the fictions I study here often traps women in cultural stereotypes of femininity," Wyatt admits, but she adds that the narrative impulse behind these works lets identification "provide inspiration for breaking free of conventional gender ideology." Sandra Cisneros's signature story, "Woman Hollering Creek," features just such an episode, whereby "a Chicana whose stance on the border between Mexican and American culture gives her the flexibility to play with and recombine various cultures' gender roles." In Toni Morrison's Beloved the reader can see how issues of race complicate the structure of primary identification, just as fixations on an ideal ego by a black woman in Tar Baby contrast with the less material idealizations imposed on racial identities by white feminists (who are...