American 1980's Literature

[ASHLEEJAMES]

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.
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[JBI]

I don't think I agree - Emerson still reigns in America, and Americans still for the most part only read American authors. All the pop culture references and what-not are American pop culture references, not anything else. Even American academics seem to think America the greatest country in terms of literary development. Yet American post-modernism to me seems rather weak. Poetry, for one thing, has become almost silly in the States, with the constant debates between the new "schools" of poetry, arguing over formal or open form, a debate long dragged-out.

The American view, I would argue, hasn't changed much. Despite the large immigrant population in the States, I don't really get a feeling of their voices at all. I don't really hear anything different in contemporary American literature than, for instance, 1960s literature. In the 1980s, there wasn't much improvement.

That being said, I don't want to hit down every American writer. I am just trying to point out, that things aren't as progressive as they may seem. This whole globalization myth is so unapparent in American literature that it is almost laughable.

The traditional forms also are not so open shut - Americans are still debating amongst themselves the merits of Open Form verses Formal poetry - Whitman has been gone over 100 years, and they still can't seem to accept him - how comical.

I'd like to add, that when it comes to post-modern sensibility, I doubt, for instance, the States is as developed in that sense than Canada, or various parts of Europe, or Latin America. It seems that xenophobia and American hegemony underlie almost every text. There is no embrace of other trends, other literary devices. If you want a really good post-modern read, for instance (though I am reluctant to give it that title, since the book I have in mind even transcends post-modernism) you may want to try a Canadian work, particularly Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water which thoroughly mixes in Native American oral and western post-modern techniques.

As for post-modernity, The States aren't quite there yet. A few writers I would say are, but for the most part, it seems the States are in a form of negative modernism.

[chasestalling]

i don't know if referring to pop culture is the essence of postmodernism, but if one were to make them, it would seem the writer would do well to stick to american ones.