The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period

by David Cowart

Overview

In The Tribe of Pyn, Cowart offers illuminating readings of several important novelists now at the height of their powers, whose work has received fairly limited scholarly attention thus far. Jonathan Franzen, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Gloria Naylor, Richard Powers, and a raft of others are examined with lapidary care. Wrestling with the challenges inherent to distinguishing generational character (especially in the postmodern context, which is often marked by its disavowal of ideas of origin, etc.), Cowart teases out interactions and entanglements that help illuminate the work of the younger writers at the center of this study and also that of the trailblazers on its ragged frontiers.

By comparing literary figures born in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and later with those born in the 1920s and 1930s, Cowart seeks to map the changing terrain of contemporary letters. Hardly epigones, he argues, the younger writers add fresh inflections to the grammar of literary postmodernism. Younger writers can continue to “make it new,” Cowart establishes, without needing to dismantle the aesthetic they have inherited from a parental generation.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472052882
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	12/02/2015
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David Cowart is the Louise Fry Scudder Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Table of Contents

Proem: Postmodernism (Again) 1

Introduction: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period 7

Chapter 1 Fantasy and Reality in Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban 30

Chapter 2 Colonized Tongue, Colonized Pen: Heritage and Deracination in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" 39

Chapter 3 Braid of Blood: Michael Dorris's A Yellow Raft in Blue Water 53

Chapter 4 Matriarchal Mythopoesis: Gloria Naylor's Mama Day 64

Chapter 5 The Jeffersonian Vision in Steve Erickson's Are d'X 81

Chapter 6 Passionate Pathography: Narrative as Pharmakon in Richard Powers's Operation Wandering Saul 91

Chapter 7 Anger, Anguish, and Art: Chuck Palahniuk's Choke 107

Chapter 8 The Aim Was Song: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto 124

Chapter 9 The Sorrows of Young Icarus Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves 146

Chapter 10 Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad 175

Conclusion: The Emperor Writes Back 192

Notes 201

Bibliography 227

Index 243