1970s 1980s

American Fiction
and Poetry (I)
American Literature, 1945 to Date
Mihai Mindra, Spring 2013

Contents with List

Multiculturalism; Feminist Fiction; Ethnic Postmodernism;
Minimalism; Post-Postmodernism.

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) Raymond Carver, Cathedral (1983)

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (1987)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
Gloria Anzalda, La consciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New
Consciousness; How to Tame a Wild Tongue; El sonavabitche
(1987)

Ethnic Postmodernism
Neo-Slave Narrative: Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987)
See previous lectures on African-American writing to
identify main topics approached by African-American
authors, beginning with the Harlem Renaissance.
Briefly: slave experience had not been a topic in itself, although the
effects of slavery had been approached by other writers indirectly
(R. Ellison, R. Wright, a.o.)

The factual story of Beloved (1987) was true ( a mother escaped

from the South killed her daughter with a handsaw rather than
leave her with her master):
Morrison discovered it as a newspaper clipping.

Neo-Slave Narrative: Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987)

She decided to write it as a typical slave

narrative, but in the process she noted that the
traditional literary tools had become inadequate.
Slave narrative: hybrid
1st person narrative with features of
sentimental fiction and documentary evidence
[letters, newspaper clippings etc.)
white person favorably presenting the ex-slave.
E.g. Frederick Douglasss narrative.

Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987)

Neo-slave narrative
theorized and explained by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy in Neo-Slave
Narratives. Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999

Bloomed in the 1960s on the background of the Civil Rights

movement & Black Nationalism:

Main aim: to foreground black subjectivity.

Practical purpose: rewrite black history / literature & attempt to
discover and forge a separate literary / aesthetic tradition.

Female neo-slave narrative writers examples: Toni Morrisons

Beloved & Alice Walkers Color Purple, a.o.

Slave Narratives
Abolitionists - a potent weapon in first-hand
accounts of slavery by blacks who escaped from
bondage or managed to buy their freedom.

White activists recommended the slave narratives as

unaltered testimonies.

In fact they frequently re-wrote passages and fabricated

events to excite the readers interest and sympathy.

Slave Narratives
Frederick Douglass: his abolitionist publishers told him simply to give us
the facts, and they would take care of the philosophy.

The collaboration between well-intentioned white editors and

fugitive slaves usually resulted in hybrid works:
mixture of verisimilitude (first-person narrative, professions of objectivity,
documentary evidence letters, bills of sale, newspaper clippings)

with characteristics of sentimental fiction (garish asides, shrill polemics,

melodramatic incidents).

a potent new genre (the slave narratives) in which blacks

wrote themselves in the American consciousness.
Whatever their degree of veracity, the slave narratives both fed and increased
the public appetite for accurate information concerning life in the real world.

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

Source: JAMES OLNEY, I Was Born: Slave Narratives, Their Status as
Autobiography and as Literature. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
eds. The Slave's Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 150-168.

Ex-slaves cannot talk about imagination, as other autobiographers /

memoirists since they cannot afford to shade doubts on their account (151)
Descriptive language rather than metaphorical / poetical when slaveholders habits are
described;

With a view to authenticating the story, certain patterns mold the actual
events in the life of the narrator into a form that could be easily recognized
by the readership of the time (1840s 1860s) common elements, such as:
an engraved portrait or photograph of the subject of the narrative
authenticating testimonials, prefixed or postfixed
poetic epigraphs, snatches of poetry in the text, poems appended

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

illustrations before, in the middle of, or after the narrative itself
interruptions of the narrative proper by way of declamatory
addresses to the reader and passages that as to style might well
come from an adventure story, a romance, or a novel of sentiment
bewildering variety of documents: letters to and from the narrator,
bills of sale, newspaper clippings, notices of slave auctions and of
escaped slaves, certificates of marriage, of manumission, of birth
and death, wills, extracts from legal codes [that appear everywhere
in the text, incl. footnotes & appendices]
sermons and anti-slavery speeches and essays tacked on at the
end to demonstrate post-narrative activities of the narrator (Olney
151-2)

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

In terms of narrative progression, generally the slave narrative
would proceed as follows:
An engraved portrait, signed by the narrator.
A title page that includes the claim, as an integral part of the title, "Written
by Himself" (or some close variant: "Written from a statement of Facts Made
by Himself"; or "Written by a Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones";
etc. ).

A handful of testimonials and/or one or more prefaces or introductions

written either by a white abolitionist friend of the narrator ( William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips) or by a white amanuensis/ editor/author actually
responsible for the text ( John Greenleaf Whittier, David Wilson, Louis Alexis
Chamerovzow), in the course of which preface the reader is told that the
narrative is a "plain, unvarnished tale" and that naught "has been set down
in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination"
indeed, the tale, it is claimed, understates the horrors of slavery.

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

A poetic epigraph, by preference from William Cowper.

The actual narrative:

first sentence beginning, "I was born . . . ," then specifying a place but
not a date of birth sketchy account of parentage, often involving a
white father

description of a cruel master, mistress, or overseer, details of first

observed whipping and numerous subsequent whippings, with women
very frequently the victims

account of one extraordinarily strong, hardworking slave often "pure

African"who, because there is no reason for it, refuses to be whipped

record of the barriers raised against slave literacy and the

overwhelming difficulties encountered in learning to read and write

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

description of a "Christian" slaveholder (often of one such
dying in terror) and the accompanying claim that "Christian"
slave-holders are invariably worse than those professing no
religion
description of the amounts and kinds of food and clothing
given to slaves, the work required of them, the pattern of a
day, a week, a year
account of a slave auction, of families being separated and
destroyed, of distraught mothers clinging to their children as
they are torn from them, of slave coffles being driven South
description of patrols, of failed attempt(s) to escape, of pursuit
by men and dogs

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

description of successful attempt(s) to escape, lying by during the
day, travelling by night guided by the North Star, reception in a free
state by Quakers who offer a lavish breakfast and much genial
thee/thou conversation

taking of a new last name (frequently one suggested by a white

abolitionist) to accord with new social identity as a free man, but
retention of first name as a mark of continuity of individual identity .

An appendix or appendices composed of documentary

material: bills of sale, details of purchase from slavery,
newspaper items, further reflections on slavery, sermons,
anti-slavery speeches, poems, appeals to the reader for funds
and moral support in the battle against slavery. (Olney 152)

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

what is being recounted in the narratives is nearly
always the realities of the institution of slavery, almost
never the intellectual, emotional, moral growth of the
narrator [Douglass is an exception]

The lives in the narratives are never, or almost never,

there for themselves and for their own intrinsic, unique
interest but nearly always in their capacity as
illustrations of what slavery is really like.
in one sense the narrative lives of the ex-slaves were as
much possessed and used by the abolitionists as their actual
lives had been by slaveholders (Olney 154).

Slave Narratives Textual Patterns

behind every slave narrative that is in any way
characteristic or representative there is the one same
persistent and dominant motivation, which is determined
by the interplay of narrator, sponsors, and audience and
which itself determines the narrative in theme, content,
and form.
The theme is the reality of slavery and the necessity of abolishing it
the content is a series of events and descriptions that will make the
reader see and feel the realities of slavery

the form is a chronological, episodic narrative beginning with an

assertion of existence and surrounded by various testimonial
evidences for that assertion (Olney 156)

Questions to be addressed when

reading T. Morrisons novel
What is the role of imagination in Morrisons novel? Does the
narrator attempt to convey a sense of undeniable authenticity?

What about the beginning of the novel? Is the literary strategy

used by T. Morrison the same with that used in slave narratives?

What about the other textual patterns specific for the

(traditional) slave narratives? Are they to be found in T.
Morrisons novel? What is the representational goal that may
inform the choice to divert from the master outline presented on
the previous slides?
Answers to these questions define the neo-slave narrative as imagined by
T. Morrison (to be discussed in relation to fragments in the handout)

Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987)

combination of existential concerns compatible with a
mythic presentation of African-American experience;

return to the roots of mythic culture as opposed to the

Wests rejection of it as magic associated with
magical realism;
However, T. Morrisons novel is not to be understood only within
the framework of South American magical realism, but to be
approached from the perspective of African (and AfricanAmerican for that matter) definition of the real and the magical;
Totally opposed to Western dichotomy.

Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987)

A source of the mythical substructure of her fiction:
the Bible in a problematic, existential setting;
the essential truth of myth is preserved but there are reversals of the orthodox
assumptions of meaning: rebels become heroes; good creates evil; sins redeem the
doer.

Timeless motifs fused with African American myths and fantasy e.g.
the parable of the fall and its related themes:

The quest for identity

Initiation (the passage from innocence to experience)
The nature of good and evil
The ambiguity of the garden and the serpent

adapted to describe the emerging selfhood in black characters

trapped in a white society.

Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987)

Preservation of the Self to survive her protagonists must violate
the rule of the oppressive system, reject the values it venerates
and recover the human potential denied to blacks
The fortunate fall the necessary and potentially redemptive passage from
a garden state of debilitating innocence to painful self-knowledge and its
consequences as a return to the true community and village
consciousness the victorious end the discovery of the black
consciousness muted in a white society

In a society operated by an oppressive order, not to win in the

conventional (Christian) sense perpetuates an immoral justice
in such a world, innocence is itself a sign of guilt
it signals a degenerate acquiescence
not to fall becomes more destructive than to fall.

Post-postmodernist American Fiction

Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 August 2,

1988)
Cathedral (1984) Minimalist fiction:
Considered to be the major influence in popularizing
this kind of fiction;
Other writers: Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, and Frederick
Barthelme.
Main features: disruptions in the lives of commonplace
people rendered in a very economical, tense prose
style, which omits any direct emotional outburst;

Raymond Carver (1938 1988)

Similar therefore to E. Hemingways principle of
omission influence openly acknowledged by the
writers above, including R. Carver.
Plus in R. Carvers case: A. Chekhov (ordinary characters
with apparently insignificant dilemmas & traumatic stories).

In R. Carvers case:
Disruptions are followed by the characters alienation / isolation from their
usual world;
Initial stories: this alienation, however, is not lived dramatically (as with the
modernists) but is only barely understood (similar to postmodernists);

Short stories beginning with Cathedral (1983/84): isolation / crisis leads to epiphany
(no longer similar to postmodernists).

Raymond Carver (1938 1988)

Nighthawks
(1942) one of
Edward Hoppers
paintings which
appealed to R.
Carver.
- Similar theme:
loneliness and
isolation.

Raymond Carver (1938 1988)

Initial stories: sometimes obsessively recounts
minute details which, however, do not point to
any overall meaning / significance of the
disruption (similar to postmodernists)
This concern with minute details has
triggered the term minimalism;
John Barth jokingly called this kind of fiction:
hyperrealistic minimalism or the-less-ismore school.

Raymond Carver (1938 1988)

Carver never accepted the term minimalism as suitable for his fiction
because:
It failed to convey the degree of complexity present in his short stories, particularly
when it came to interpersonal relationships and human affection; should be limited
to his What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

His goal was not to minutely describe the commonplace, but to investigate the
intricate nature of human actions;

He maintained that he was driven by the desire for exactness:

In his essay "On Writing":
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects
using commonplace but precise language to endow those things - a chair, a window
curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even starling power. (24)

R. Baird Shuman, ed. Great American Writers: Twentieth Century. Volume 2.

New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2002. 255 - 275.

Raymond Carver (1938 1988)

Stories from Cathedral (1984)
different due to topics such as reconciliation
between people who seemed totally at odds
with one another no longer postmodernist.
Epiphanies happen, which entails that
knowledge of the others & oneself is possible
(no longer postmodernist).

Post-postmodernist American Fiction

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936)
White Noise (1985)
Stories of characters who face life in a postmodern, post-industrial, televisual culture.
DeLillo's characters pathetically struggle in a
world of indecipherable, de-centered systems.
DeLillo's America, especially in White Noise:
aspects of post-modernism noted by Lyotard
and Baudrillard.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

Simulacra and Simulation (1981):
Baudrillard claims that modern society has
replaced all reality and meaning with symbols
and signs, and that the human experience is
of a simulation of reality rather than reality
itself.
The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are
signs of culture and media that create the
perceived reality.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, 1979
(The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
1984):
our age (with its postmodern condition) is marked by an 'incredulity
towards meta-narratives' / 'grand narratives'
grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world; e.g.,: the
progress of history, knowability of everything by science, and the
possibility of absolute freedom.

Lyotard argues that we have ceased to believe that narratives of

this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all.

alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our

aspirations, beliefs and desire postmodernity is characterised by

an abundance of micronarratives.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

the grand narrative has lost its credibility,
regardless of what mode of unification it uses,
regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a
narrative of emancipation" (Lyotard 37)
There is no retreat to any kind of transcendental knowledge.
Science, religion, etc. can't explain away the complexities of
human experience.

The underlying truth of all things is that the underlying truth of

all things is a red herring.

The world does not make sense in any simple way, according to
any single system.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

Lyotard does not think that the breakdown of the
metanarratives is a bad thing, but rather a widening of
possibilities.

He suggests that we play "language games" subject only to the

local rules of self-legitimation.

Lyotard is the advocate of a kind of intellectual free agency

from all-encompassing systems, which, in their exclusivity, are
"terroristic" (63).

Lyotard would have us shun consensus-oriented thought, and

accept a paralogy:
a flood of good ideas that are inspired by conversation.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

While DeLillo and Lyotard would agree that the age of the metanarratives
has ended, DeLillo sees more of the loss, more of the cultural vacuity in our
age, when there is no objective truth, no metaphysical court of appeals for
humanity.

What DeLillo recognizes, perhaps more than Lyotard, is that there is

something very human in the belief that there must be an underlying logic
to human events, that there must be a reason for everything that occurs,
and that it must fit into some grand, if imperceivable, plan.

DeLillo on fiction writer: "I think fiction rescues history from its confusions. It
can do this in the somewhat superficial way of filling in blank spaces. But it
also can operate in a deeper way: providing the balance and rhythm we
don't experience in our daily lives, in our real lives" (Decurtis 56).
The world of a novel, then, has an advantage over the "real" world -- in the novel, real
order can be achieved; the novelist can provide patterns that contemporary life cannot.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

DeLillo is obsessed with systems:
individuals have a symbiotic/parasitic love/hate relationship with
systems. Systems are loops that people get caught up in, but systems,
be they belief systems, institutional, mystical, work, or personal systems,
are things that people cling to in times of trouble, because if something
is part of a system, it has a reason -- it is within human control.

In White Noise, we see the retreat to systems, and to metanarratives,

over and over again:
Jack Gladney, chair of the Hitler Studies (image/media fill in identity
gap) department at College-on-the-Hill, tries to find solace for his
existential angst in a whole series of narratives, each of which might
have been potential metanarratives.

Consumerism, science, and religion all seem to offer potentialities which,

when exposed to the brutal light of reality, are insufficient.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

Consumerism: a belief, propagated and disseminated by
television advertising, that you can buy your way out of any
personal trauma.
In buying things at the mall, you may define an identity, an
idea of who you are.
When Jack Gladney goes to the mall: "I shopped for its own
sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no
intention of buying, then buying it. . . . I began to grow in
value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of
myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed" (84).
shopping may offer a kind of existential relief for Gladney, a
sense of control over his destiny and his identity.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

Another metanarrative: science
Science becomes in many ways a kind of physic refuge:
rationality; a realm in which problems can be quantified, measured, renamed,
and made to go away;

As network executive cum film-maker David Bell notes in DeLillo's first novel,
Americana (1971): "America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of
statistic. . . . Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have
had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the
satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel
rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag" (159).

White Noise: when the radio reports upgrade the gas leak from "feathery plume"
to "black billowing cloud," Jack Gladney tells his son that it's good, because, "It
means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top
of the situation" (105).
Although the authorities weren't apparently preventing the disaster from occurring,
they were developing a jargon, an empirical method in which Jack could take comfort.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

After learning through advanced technological imaging
techniques that he has a large growth in his guts and that he will
positively die, Gladney is shut out of scientific metanarrative
and needs to search for another. Murray, as a purely cynical
therapeutic method, suggests religion:
'Millions of people have believed for thousands of years. Throw
in with them. Belief in a second birth, a second life, is
practically universal. This must mean something. 'But these
gorgeous systems are all so different. 'Pick one you like'"
(286).
It doesn't particularly matter which religious system Gladney
chooses, Murray's reasoning follows, as long as it provides
the necessary relief.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

One of the recurrent themes in DeLillo's fiction:
the substance of our society is in fact not substantial, but
composed of images of things, of ideas of things, and of false
things:
"DeLillo's most astute commentators are in general agreement
that the America of White Noise is a fully postmodern one. For
DeLillo's characters, contemporary American 'reality' has
become completely mediated and artificial; theirs is a culture of
comprehensive and seemingly total representation" (Moses 64).
In DeLillo's view; our relation to simulacra is not a simple one.
We do not merely disdainfully live in a world of false things; we
embrace the simulacra and thrive on them. Simulacra are a part,
perhaps the predominant element, of our life-world.

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

In White Noise, simulation is not just a fact of
contemporary existence, it is a comfort.
In a world where there is very little metaphysical belief to cling
to, the simulacra become something that people can define
themselves, and their sense of reality, against.

The simulacra, the television images, the radio reports, the

medical imaging devices: are considered more real the
immediate personal perceptions of the characters.
When "the airborne toxic event" has begun, Jack's wife Babette
urges him to turn the radio off: "So the girls can't hear. They haven't
gotten beyond the deja vu. I want to keep it that way. 'What if the
symptoms are real? 'How could they be real? 'Why couldn't they be
real? 'They only get them only when they're broadcast,'" (133).

Don DeLillo (b. 1936)

White Noise,: metanarratives fail.
Jack Gladney, in his appeals to various systems, finds that none of
them are the true grand narrative.

Similar conclusion with Lyotard. However, for Lyotard, the dissensus

of the individual narratives is not necessarily a bad, but in fact a
creative process.
In White Noise, the effect of all the systems being autonomous and not
tied into one grand meta-system is disorienting, discomforting, and
disastrous.

All the systems are equal, all the narratives bear the same weight & none
has recourse to any kind of metaphysical reality individual subjects
are left to make sense of their lives & surroundings on their own.

DeLillo's America may be a postmodern one, but DeLillo perspective on

this postmodern reality is not postmodernist.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

Wrote poetry, criticism and a large number of
translations from French literature;

made his reputation with a series of three novels,

collectively known as The New York Trilogy (1987).
considered one of the foremost American novelists now writing.
anti-detective fictions influenced by :
Beckett,
French post-war experimental fiction, and
postmodern theory.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

All three - their plot based on some kind of writer in pursuit of another
( postmodernist self-reflexivity ) + the second and third books, Ghosts (1986)
and The Locked Room (1986), another who is an eerie double of the
protagonist.

The first, City of Glass (1985) alludes to Poe and Walter Benjamin in its
figuring of a fragmenting self in the city.
The city of glass suggests the detective's mastery of the complexity of signs, but presents
us with the abysmal possibility that, rather than reading the city, it is a mirror-glass that
merely reflects Quinn's own concerns back at him

self-reflexiveness: fiction does not REPRESENT reality but itself: the fictionality of fiction is
thus pointed out.

The novels seem to be psychological studies but the fragmentation at the end
of City of Glass, for instance, is not psychological (as it would be in many
modernist novels) but textual :
Quinn disappears when his notebook finishes.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

Ghosts
the most formal of the trilogy;
Blue is employed by White to follow Black. Taking notes, Blue
sits in his room and watches Black writing in the building across
the road. Black may be writing about him. (self-reflexivity) Black
may in fact be White. Again we have a tale of someone who
drops out of routine existence and lets social ties fall away in
pursuit of an obsession.

The Locked Room

stylistic control, and plenitude of stories within stories;

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

his most remarkable novel according to critics: Moon Palace
the story of Marco Stanley Fogg, continues the quest theme of his first work.

The Music of Chance (1990) begins as a road novel and ends as a parable about free will and,
as in all his fiction, it is saturated with references to American and European literature which
are part of a literary technique that teases away at the surface realism of these later novels.

Leviathan (1992) is concerned with the political implications of public writing, and echoes some
of the themes of Don DeLillo's Mao II (1990).

Mr Vertigo (1994) uses the old American form of the tall tale to narrate the story of a boy who
can fly.

The novels after The New York Trilogy maintain Auster's admirable desire to avoid repeating
himself, while exemplifying his continuing theme of fluid selves held together (or not) by the
ability to narrate:
self exists only in the literary text, constructed and deconstructed by the immanent God-like writer.

Source: The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Stuart Sim, London: Routledge.,
2001.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

His fiction difficult to classify, as it borrows from different
traditions and participates in, without belonging to, various
schools of writing.

His work combines metafictive elements with a clearly articulated

interest in, and engagement with, the contemporary world.
Overt references to the act and the nature of writing and self-conscious
subversions of traditional notions of story-telling are never divorced from
questions pertaining to urban living, Western history, capitalism, the
tyranny of money, and the role of the author in society.

Especially in the novels that follow The New York Trilogy, a delicate balance
is maintained between what can be broadly termed realism and
experimentation, between an enquiry into the world and an exploration of
the nature of the self as it appears in language.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

His work may deal with abstract notions, and the
emphasis may appear to be on form and style, but
many of his chosen themes and tropes are borrowed
from the American tradition.
He writes about baseball, the Statue of Liberty, the
Depression; about the American West and the
anonymity of the great city.
However, his references to American culture are often
subordinated to a larger project of a more
philosophical quality.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

Auster bemoans the loss of a philosophical dimension
from recent American writing:
The fact is that the American novel changed. The novels of
Melville and Hawthorne, the stories of Poe and the writings of
Thoreau for example, all of whom I am passionately interested
in, were not about sociology, which is what the novel has come
to concern itself [with] in the United States. It's something else.
They had a metaphysical dimension, a philosophical dimension
to them which I think has been forgotten and ignored.
(From an unpublished interview with Professor Christopher Bigsby,
University of East Anglia, quoted with Paul Auster's kind permission.
Subsequent references will be to Interview by Christopher
Bigsby., Varvogli, 4)

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

The New York Trilogy
a good example of how Auster reconciles realism with
experiment, and sociology with writing that has a
metaphysical dimension.
The book has been described as a postmodern detective
story; like Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon or Borges before
him, Auster borrows some elements from detective fiction
and uses his own writing to explore the nature and expose
the limitations of the genre, and to ask questions of a more
philosophical nature concerning perception, interpretation,
and the availability of truth, or meaning.
= revision of classical postmodernism.

Paul Auster (b. 1947)

The New York Trilogy also belongs to the tradition of
metafictional writing by virtue of its self-conscious nature.
Auster not only violates traditional conventions of time, place,
causality and unity of action, he also crosses ontological boundaries
by creating a character named Paul Auster in City of Glass, (ibid.)

and by an authorial intrusion in The Locked Room, where the reader is

addressed by the author who explains that the three stories are
finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my
awareness of what it is about (The Locked Room. Los Angeles: Sun
and Moon Press, 294).
Source: The World That Is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction. Aliki Varvogli, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2001

Feminine Voices
Two major elements at work in womens literature, beyond the phase of a search for
identity:
the insistence on looking at the data of ordinary life and on using the occupations of women,
overlooked by high culture; one clings to felt reality

an urge to create a new set of values that will suit the lives and purposes of women a seen by
women: a system of authentic emotional relations and interconnected beliefs drawn from lived
experience:
this grandiose program may seem to conflict with the details of everyday life (some feminine writing does
rush toward utopia), bur actually it works within everyday experience, looking there for clues to a new
interpretative paradigm

a quest for a new symbology respecting the real and refusing to assign an arbitrary value to it; preferring to
let its own significance illuminate it from within
E.g.: Joyce Carol Oates - her characters - part of an elite whose actions show up the workings of a shaky and
inhumane social structure.

In terms of form, these texts coexistence of apparently hybrid elements to various

degrees.
Extremely visible in texts written by ethnic feminist writers (e.g. Anzaldua, Walker), who aimed to
define new aesthetics.

Less visible as drowned in various realist strategies (in minimalist / Updike-like fashion) A. Tyler.

Gloria Anzalda (1941 2004)

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
defined the boundaries of mestizaje (mit y mit: combined
ancestry).

This state is not limiting, but on the contrary, empowering

(Mexican-American, lesbian, etc.).

No longer a struggle between minority and mainstream, or to

reconcile opposites, but a search for a new type of
consciousness: being on both shores of the border at once
(Rebolledo 78)

new language & new aesthetics.

Source : Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tey
Diana Rebolledo; Tucson: The Universoty of Arizona Press, 1995.

Gloria Anzalda (1941 2004)

E.g. in La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New
Consciousness:
Jos Vasconcelos (La Raza Csmica: Misin de la Raza IberoAmericana, Mxico: Aguilar S.A. de Ediciones, 1961) Mexican
philosopher, envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas
afines, una raza de color la primera raza sintesis del globo.

He called it a cosmic race, la raza csmica, a fifth race

embracing the four major races of the world.

Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of

racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of
inclusivity. (Anzaldua 99)