Proposing a panel or panels on postmodern-era US Fiction for this year’s American Literature Association Conference, which will happen in Chicago from May 20-23.

The era is now fading into history when the study of Contemporary Literature foregrounded the innovative fictions of “postmodernists” from Thomas Pynchon to Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison to John Barth. Without an institutional home between the chronological curriculum categories of “Modernist” and “Contemporary,” this generation of US authors—those who published their first novels between 1945 and 1980, and whose careers were marked by the effort to move beyond conventional realisms, and to generate new forms for each novel they published—have become less and less central to current literary study. 

A few big names like Pynchon, Morrison, Delillo, McCarthy remain touchstones, but many of their generation’s most idiosyncratic authors now go unread and untaught. What might they have to offer our understanding of literature today?

We thus propose panels to gather up some discussion of this generation’s unique interest, both by revising calcified understandings of its major figures, and in paying attention to the less-studied members of the generation to see what revisions they might prompt.

We seek papers for this conference in two areas:

1)        Understudied “postmodernists”: beyond the Pynchons, Delillos, Morrisons, which under-recognised authors of this generation wrote texts that might either change our understanding of the era’s writing, or contribute something distinctive to present literary work? If you’re doing research on a formally unconventional US author who published their first book between 1945 and 1990, and who hasn’t been much studied in the last decade, send us your paper-proposals…

2)        Revisions of the “postmodern” field. Three 1980s accounts of “postmodernist fiction” (McHale, Hutcheon, Jameson) remain dominant. But how should that whole generation of US authors be understood, valued, sub-categorised beyond those early paradigms? What new alignments and perspectives might emerge from studying all the era’s innovative fiction, not only those initially designated as “postmodernists”?  If you have reframings of the field, or revisionary readings of its major authors, send us your paper-proposals…

Please send abstracts of up to 200 words to Ali Chetwynd at achetwynd@aubg.edu, by January 25th. The ALA needs full panel proposals before January 30th, so the panel-deadline of the 25th should ensure full consideration.