Notes Introduction 1. See, e.g., Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 2. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 13–63. 3. Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 99–100. 4. See the essay “Rewriting Modernity,” in Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 24–35. 5. The Illusions of Postmodernism, passim. 6. See, e.g., Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic, 1973). 7. “Foreword” to Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xiii. 8. My use of the term “literary field” derives from the work of the French sociol- ogist Pierre Bourdieu, who writes, “The literary field (one may also speak of the artistic field, the philosophical field, etc.) is an independent social universe with its own laws of functioning, its specific relations of force, its dominants and dominated, and so forth. Put another way, to speak of ‘field’ is to recall that lit- erary works are produced in a particular social universe endowed with particu- lar institutions and obeying specific laws,” “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia, 1993), p. 163. 9. See Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery, eds., The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994); Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds., Pynchon and Mason & Dixon (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000); and Charles Clerc, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000). 10. Prominent among those who have mentioned DeLillo’s importance are David Foster Wallace, who refers extensively to White Noise in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” A Supposedly Fun Thing 218 / notes I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), and includes allusions to DeLillo’s early work, notably End Zone and Ratner’s Star, in his astonishing novel Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996); Jonathan Franzen has spoken of DeLillo’s influence and example, and quotes from a letter DeLillo wrote him in his essay “Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels,” Harper’s (April 1996); DeLillo himself has written jacket blurbs for novelists of the generation of Wallace and Franzen, including Franzen himself, Siri Hustvedt, Dana Spiotta, Denis Johnson, and Stephen Wright, not to mention older luminaries, such as William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Paul Auster. 11. How To Be Alone: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 165. 12. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Ballantine, 1994). 13. Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 195–223. 14. See Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 88–133. 15. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambrige: MIT Press, 1989). For critical assessments of Habermas’s theory, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 16. See Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, esp. pp. 210–229. 17. For a celebrated account of the historical and philosophical genesis of this ideology of the subject, see C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 18. Quoted in Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” p. 54, 19. Carole Maso, “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice: Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 16 (Spring 1996): 54–75; rpt. in Carole Maso, Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000), pp. 161–191. 20. Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook (Normal, IL: FC2, 1995). 21. “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1984), p. 72. 22. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. ix. 23. Ibid., p. 1. 24. The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), p. 102. 25. There is in fact a case to be made for Roth as a postmodern writer. Throughout his career he has made use of devices from the postmodern bag of tricks, including metafiction and ontological dubiety. Chapter 1 Late Postmodernism and the Literary Field 1. Alex Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 13. 2. See Stanley Fish, “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 389. notes / 219 3. Hal Foster, “Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?” The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 205–226; John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, pp. 13–63. 4. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 1. 5. See Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, pp. 27–29. 6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 1–2. 7. See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 8. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), p. 9. 9. Consider, for example, the work of Richard Kostelanetz, who has long been dedicated to the recovery of avant-garde writing from the modernist period: see The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982) and many other titles; or the interest of the poets associated with the journal LϭAϭNϭGϭUϭAϭGϭE in Gertrude Stein: see, for example, Lyn Hejinian, “Two Stein Talks” (1986), The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 83–130. 10. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 11. Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, pp. 15–20. 12. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 3–5. 13. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 81. 14. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 1. 15. Wendy Steiner, “Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 7: Prose Writing, 1940–1990, ed. by Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 425–538. Future references will be given in parentheses. 16. Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 191–215. 17. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Philip Stevick, Alternative Pleasures: Postrealist Fiction and the Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). 18. William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1977) and The World Within the Word: Essays (New York: Knopf, 1978); Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); Ronald Sukenick, In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) and Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969); John Barth, 220 / notes The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1984). 19. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–125; “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 52–92. For a discussion of the development and sig- nificance of Jameson’s work on the postmodern, see Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), subsequent references will be given in parentheses. 20. In this respect, Wendy Steiner’s postmodernism is the antithesis of Lyotard’s; where he argues for an aesthetic of the sublime, she works to rehabilitate the beautiful. 21. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 22. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,