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American Prose, 1945-1990: Realism and Experimentation

Robert Penn Warren (© AP Images) Tennessee Williams (© AP Images)
Eudora Welty (© AP Images) James Baldwin (© AP Images)
Ralph Ellison (© AP Images) John Cheever (© AP Images)
John Updike (© AP Images) Norman Mailer (© AP Images)
Philip Roth (© AP Images) Toni Morrison (© AP Images)
Amiri Baraka (© AP Images) David Mamet (© AP Images)

Narrative in the decades following World War II resists generalization: It was extremely various and multifaceted. It was vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magical realism, while the electronic era brought the global village. The spoken word on television gave new life to oral tradition. Oral genres, media, and popular culture increasingly influenced narrative.

In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and example; the reverse seems true in the United States in the postwar years. Serious novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow borrowed from and commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs, and oral history.

To say this is not to trivialize this literature: Writers in the United States were asking serious questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. Writers became highly innovative and self-aware, or reflexive. Often they found traditional modes ineffective and sought vitality in more widely popular material. To put it another way, American writers in the postwar decades developed a postmodern sensibility. Modernist restructurings of point of view no longer sufficed for them; rather, the context of vision had to be made new.


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1175


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