After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s

Notes

notes Introduction 1. See Boyer (By the Bomb’s Early Light) for a discussion of the immediate reactions to the use of the Bomb, as reflected in the widespread appearance of the language of awe, terror, and apocalypse; see also Lifton and Mitchell (Hiroshima in America), and Nadel (Containment Culture). For parallels in reactions to 9/11, see May, Judith Greenberg, Amy Kap­ lan, Young. 2. See Cumings, Kellner, Robin, Schrecker (“Cold War”), Willis. 3. A contrasting interpretation, in the words of Raymond Garthoff: “The West did not, as is widely believed, win the Cold War through geopolitical containment and military deterrence. Nor was the Cold War won by the Reagan military buildup and the Reagan Doctrine, as some have suggested. . . . [T]he Western and above all the American role in ending the Cold War was necessary but not primary” (128–31). 4. As Gaddis argued in December 1991 at the 90th Anniversary Nobel Jubilee Symposium “Beyond the Cold War: New Dimensions in International Relations,” “The use of one or two nuclear weapons, in the post– Cold War World, would not end the world as we have known it. . . . Nuclear weapons have evolved from their initial status in our minds as the ultimate instrument of the Apocalypse to, first, a means of deterrence, and then a method of reassurance, and then an object for negotiation, and then an inconvenience to be circumvented, and finally an embarrassment of such magnitude that old Cold War antagonists now race to divest themselves of what they once raced each other so avidly to possess . From having worried about how nuclear weapons could destroy us we have progressed to worrying about how we can safely destroy them, and that is undeniably progress” (“The Cold War” 29). 5. Two signs of this trend are the attention garnered by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) and the January 2001 special topic issue of PMLA entitled “Globalizing Literary Studies.” See Baucom (“Globalit, Inc.”) especially for discussion of these questions. See Baucom (Specters of the Atlantic), Bhabha, Edwards, Giles, and Gilroy for 204 notes to pages 14–22 examples of transnational literary and cultural study. See Bauman, Gray, Jameson and Miyoshi, and Stiglitz for criticisms of globalization. 6. Roth and Morrison, whose reading habits and critical interests are more available to scrutiny than Pynchon’s, write novels that entertain national themes, but they maintain interest in literature from other parts of the world. Roth has championed and popularized a number of Eastern European writers; for twenty-five years, Roth edited the Penguin series Writers from the Other Europe; see also his 2002 Shop Talk, which collects interviews with Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera, among others. Morrison has written on literature from Africa; in a 2001 piece on the work of Guinean novelist Camara Laye in the New York Review of Books, Morrison writes, “[B]eing introduced in the early Sixties to the novels of Chinua Achebe, the work of Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Cyprian Ekwenski, to name a few, was more than a revelation—it was intellectually and aesthetically transforming” (“On ‘The Radiance’” 18). And Didion and O’Brien write about Americans not just at home but abroad, stressing the importance of the American role in world politics to national identity, while Eugenides brings a first-generation perspective to his account of the American experience. 7. Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion.” 8. See Gardner for an influential statement of this view of meta­ fiction. 9. In “My Three Stooges” (Hooking). Wolfe’s criticisms of Updike, Mailer, and Irving are perhaps not so strange, given that each wrote a negative review of his 1998 novel A Man in Full (see Menand, “In a Strange Land,” and Adair). See also Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” 10. For Althusser’s rejection of mediation, see Reading (186–89). Jameson argues that what Althusser is really rejecting is not mediation but rather Goldmann’s homology, a concept introduced in Goldmann’s The Hidden God and applied to the novel in his later Sociology of the Novel (Jameson, Political 43). 11. See especially “Nostalgia for the Present” in Postmodernism (279– 96). 12. See Lyotard for analysis of the loss of the grands récits or meta­ narratives by which he believes we have understood the world. 13. One example would be Hutcheon, as mentioned, who says that our concern should be not with the one truth getting told but rather with multiple truths being voiced; Dominick LaCapra, for another, in...