Introduction: Postmodernism, Then

Abstract

Fr om our contemporary vantage point, a case can certainly be made for the predictive or, perhaps, programmatic power of David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction."In this essay, Wallace posits a shift away from the postmodern irony of authors such as Don DeLillo, Mark Leyner, and Thomas Pynchon and towards a literature of sincerity that would be pioneered by a younger generation of writers raised with television. 1 And, indeed, in contemporary US literary culture, one can locate a shift away from "ironic watching" and towards the embrace of "single-entendre principles" almost everywhere: McSweeney's Quarterly Concern's emo-sincerity, the ethnic bildungsroman's emphasis on multicultural identity as upward mobility, Jonathan Franzen's social realism, n+1's enthusiastic recuperation of "high" cultural critique, novelists such as Michael Chabon's heartfelt embrace of genre fiction, and the memoir's ascension of best-seller lists, to name a few (Wallace 81).At the same time, alongside this concerted, professional abandonment of postmodernism's signature affective stance in recent North American literary enterprises, postmodernism has begun to drop out of academic discourse as well.While at least since 9/11 critics have been routinely declaring that postmodernism is, now, over, in the last five years an increasing number of critics have also begun to question whether postmodernism was ever a significant aspect of postwar American literary culture.It is these contemporary abandonments of postmodernism that provide the occasion for this special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature: the position papers and essays that compose Postmodernism, Then take the partial if not total eclipse of postmodernism in both contemporary American literature and literary criticism as the condition of possibility for returning to the category of the postmodern.In so doing, this special

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