Fiction: The 1960s to the 1980s

Without a doubt the distinguishing trait of the study of American fiction today is the widespread concern exhibited by critical scholars to invest their readings of literary materials with ethical and political significance. A range of interpretive perspectives is employed in the process of configuring the general object of investigation in a socially meaningful manner, many of these derived perspectives from adjacent fields of academic inquiry. As Shelley Streeby puts it in Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism (California), the methodologies of American studies, "with their emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking and culture's centrality to social movements and the possibility of transformative change," have proved especially helpful in tracking the capacity of narrative fictions to generate resistance—on individual and collective scales—to transnational forces of power and privilege. An engaged criticism thus addressed a plethora of urgent issues, from the legacy of slavery in the U.S. to the imminent problems associated with global warming, from the impact on disenfranchised persons of the unrealized promise of the reformist agenda of the Great Society to the worldwide consequences of the implementation of neoliberal economic policies. On the one hand, commentators look to the work of canonical authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon to disclose the entanglement of race, class, gender, and disability in the daily lives of suffering persons and historically marginalized groups. On the other hand, the work of writers previously relegated to the margins of literary history, like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, receive a good deal of attention, as speculative fiction is increasingly valorized both as an imaginatively indirect means of depicting present injustices and as the site of visionary projections of desirable or utopian futures. Alongside ongoing reassessments of the cognitive and moral benefits of popular genres, less commonly discussed writers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta and Francisco Goldman have emerged as sources of insight into the limitations of countercultural modes of dissent as well as to the challenges confronted by those committed to progressive undertakings such as the contemporary struggle for human rights. While theoretical interest in (re)defining conceptual or classificatory categories such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism continues to decline, it has not vanished entirely. Instead, such traditional preoccupations, often in conjunction with work in the realm of poetics, are woven into inquiries focused on the dire state of existence for many in the latter half of the 20th century.

i General Studies

In Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty (Stanford) Steven Schryer examines the postwar transformation of U.S. culture in the 1960s in relation to the programs of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. Writers aligned themselves with the aspirations of a new generation of politically engaged welfare workers, thus giving rise to a "process era" in which artists and activists alike sought to break free of the constraints of professionalism and make contact with those who had not attained middle-class standing in this country. Inspired by the improvisational aesthetics of the Beats, members of the white counterculture and cultural nationalists eschewed the formalities of academic modernism and its correlative insistence on artistic autonomy in favor of a performance-based approach rooted in collective existence. Though wary of the "racist romanticism" animating Jack Kerouac's search for "the class and racial outsiders who embodied" the lifestyle in question, Amiri Baraka too "embraced the idea that lower-class African Americans were the bearers of an antirationalistic black soul that challenged white America and the black bourgeoisie." His 1965 novel The System of Dante's Hell turns to his inner-city audience as an ontological resource, as the basis for a poetics of redemptive spontaneity. Yet in the end he recognizes the impossibility of complete immersion in this realm of purported authenticity. Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People also reveal the determining impact of ostensibly progressive political agencies on literature. Though adhering to...