Second newsletter by end of September, and conference panel plans soon, from a new scholarly society - SSUPFUS- for studying unconventional US fiction from the era usually called "postmodern" 

- sign up here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13ZGTYU1vgzj-WMtrtKIYkpE8I1FmYY_kZH0Sldnxbfo - and see below for more details...

As curricula and hiring committees continue to make space for “modernist” and for “contemporary,” they leave little required coverage in the chronological space between. The result is ever-less institutional home for scholarship on that important generation of “postmodernists” who published their first novels between the end of the second world war and the onset of the internet, and whose innovations first established the need for a separate field beyond the “modernism” that had gone before.  

The goal of the Society for the Study of Unconventional Prose Fiction from the US (SSUPFUS) is an organised home for discussion of this generation on its own terms, distinct from the two more institutionalised fields of “Modernism” and “Contemporary” either side of it, between which it risks falling into a gap of scholarly attention.

Our new scholarly society is pluralist, particularly dedicated to insights beyond the existing accounts and frameworks of “postmodernism,” and with an emphasis on setting less studied authors of this generation (say Marguerite Young, Joseph McElroy, Rikki Ducornet, William S Wilson, Clarence Major, Gilbert Sorrentino, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Coleman Dowell, Fran Ross, etc) alongside the big names (Pynchon, Morrison, Delillo, etc) and those who retain some scholarly attention but without whole organisations dedicated to them alone (EL Doctorow, Maxine Hong Kingston, William Gaddis, Leslie Marmon Silko, etc). 

Our projects for 2027 (new issues of our 6-monthly newsletter and a variety of conference panels) will help concentrate fresh, ongoing scholarly attention on this very distinctive, unusual—but not yet fully comprehended—generation of writers as a whole generation (rather than letting its most successful representatives, like Pynchon and Morrison, stand in for the whole).

As long as you're working on at least one US author who did something unconventional with literary form, and published their first book between 1945 and 1990, we'll welcome your contributions to the society, and work to cultivate a scholarly community and network that can support your studies.

If you’d like to join the society’s mailing list, for newsletter access and updates on new projects, please email us at ssupfus@gmail.com, or sign up at the following link, where you can also indicate interest in work on future projects.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13ZGTYU1vgzj-WMtrtKIYkpE8I1FmYY_kZH0Sldnxbfo

If you're sending items for inclusion in our next newsletter, please send by deadline of September 18th.