Call for interest (sign-up below) in a Society for the Study of Unconventional Prose Fiction from the US, 1950-2001.

 We're creating a scholarly society for studying unconventional US fiction from the era usually called "postmodern" - sign up here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_n10FmXmaJ1fNmIfzTlozM7udW4RgEMZcpWu4lGWIzs/ - and see below for more details...

The field of “Contemporary Literature” moves with the times, and has left behind most of the “postmodernists” whose innovative fictions first established the need for a separate field by their distinction from the “modernism” that had gone before.  

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 innovators in literary style, imagination and form who published their first novels between the end of the second world war and the onset of the internet.

The past decade has lamented the deaths of many of that generation’s major figures (Morrison, Barth, Doctorow, Gass, etc), while celebrating the posthumous Centenaries of many others (Gaddis, Hawkes, Gass and more).

In the wake of some recent centenary events for authors of this generation, a group of us are working to establish a Scholarly Society for studying those US authors of innovative fiction whose major works were published between 1950 and 2001.

The goal 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.

This scholarly society would be very 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). 

We could thus 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.

Long-range ideas for the Society’s activities extend as far as conferences and publications, but for 2026 we will focus on the small beginnings of a 6-monthly newsletter and some conference panels.

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

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_n10FmXmaJ1fNmIfzTlozM7udW4RgEMZcpWu4lGWIzs/

Beyond that sign-up, feel free to send questions and ideas about the Society (or newsletter updates for our first missive) to Ali Chetwynd (achetwynd@aubg.edu), who's taking the lead on coordinating things in the society's first year.