An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
Posts by tag
postmodern
13 posts
Desire Makes Storytellers of Us All: Anthropica by David Hollander
What a fitting end to the postmodern literary experiment. Or are we just getting warmed up?
The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions
Make it new, the modernists said. But how to rebuild the living body?
Discomfort, Desire, and Drugs: Talking with Ben Gwin
Ben Gwin discusses his debut novel, Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Regan Middleton, the book's unique structure, and writing satire.
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best…
Stylistically Tortuous
If you can grope your way through late James, you’ll find you have moved out of the Victorian era into the modern and, beyond that, into what we have come…
Swinging Modern Sounds #73: Prince Rogers Nelson, Guitar Player: A Symposium
I started thinking about additional, more slantwise ways we might talk about his legacy. What if I organized a bunch of guitar players?
A Year In The Life: Premiere Perseveration
I once, years ago, sat next to a colleague at a premiere, and as the lights dimmed I whispered, “Why do I do this to myself?” And yet, I persist.
The Saturday Rumpus Review: Carol
Carol is a powerful woman with enviable self-knowledge, effortlessly creating an erotic, sensual ideal of herself as a covert spectacle for queer midcentury women.
Irony Genius Vs. Realism Hero
If Franzen is our genius realist, and DFW our genius postmodernist — how might they meld irony and sincerity? In an excerpt over at Salon from his new book, Keep It Fake:…
Lighten Up
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a light neo-noir comedy, just like the Pynchon novel that inspired it. Despite our eagerness to overanalyze film adaptations of complicated books, Katie Kilkenny…
The Post-Postmodern Novel
For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon declares 2014 the year that the postmodern novel died and the year that autofiction—a “new class of memoiristic, autobiographical and metafictional novels”—rose to take its place.