A Rough Decade

Thinking about American literary and cultural history in terms of decades has perennially been part of its making. A very short list of key works that have done so might include Larzer Ziff's The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (1966), Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934), Peter Conn's The American 1930s: A Literary History (2009), or Marianne DeKoven's Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of Postmodern Culture (2004). As markedly different as these approaches to literary history may be, they share the common assumption that a decade, even with its arbitrariness as a demarcation of historical staging or process, offers a way for us to consider how the cultural work of a temporally delimited field reveals the ways in which some "we" inhabit events as we transform them into some cohesive pattern or plot.

Decadenal studies such as these and Phillip E. Wegner's Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), Samuel Cohen's After the End of History: American Fiction of the 1990s (2009), and Jay Prosser's collection, American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture (2008) tend to be slightly fuzzy around the margins of a decade—the American 1990s in all three of these titles becomes the decade-plus that runs from the commencement of the demolition of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to the terrorist attacks leading to the collapse of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001.¹ The extension of the 1990s into the "long 1990s" (just as, for example, cultural histories of the American 1930s that often open out backward to the collapse of the stock market in October, 1929 and forward to the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941) occurs in these works because the rough decade is perceived as a period between eruptive events that frame an otherwise arbitrary period of time allowing us to see history as revealing specifiable cultural logics. In effect, thinking about history in terms of decades, as these works do, is to consider its contents in terms of a somewhat unwieldy form and as having a narratable life of its own. Or, as Wegner puts it, to contemplate the "long 1990s" as a historical entity is to engage in an act of "cultural periodization" that, while reflexive of its heuristic nature, has the effect of (Wegner citing Benjamin) "blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history" (2), thus revealing as part of its framing, history as (Wegner citing Jameson) "an interplay between two forms of negation, the contrary and the contradictory, between differentiation and outright opposition, between the locally distinguished and the absolute negation, the antagonistic and non-antagonistic, the non- and the anti-" (4-5). In quite different ways, all three of these works on the American 1990s want to perceive the period of the decade-plus as an interregnum, a temporal site where the dialectical interplays Jameson catalogues lead to the possibility of imagined or projected alternatives to the ongoing "homogenous course" of the not quite (never) completed Cold War or its extension into various ends.

For Wegner and Cohen, the cultural work of the "long 1990s" contests the fatalistic sense that Cold War/post-Cold War American history regressively repeats itself in the age of globalization, and posits that there have been historical ruptures that offer possibilities—in the future, if not the present—for release from the vicious cycles of polarization and exceptionalism that have increasingly beset the national agenda since World War II. As Donald Pease has recently argued, both of these elements are combined in what Benjamin would term the "homogenous course" of American exceptionalism, which in Pease's view is marked by an...