The Essay and Literary Postmodernism: Seriousness and Exhaustion

Since the late 1960s, prominent practitioners of postmodernist fiction have been at the forefront of critical debates over contemporary American narrative. Gifted writers and brilliant essayists, from the 1960s to the 1990s, authors such as Raymond Federman, John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, and David Foster Wallace, engaged in essayistic reflections on the problem of innovation in American fiction. This chapter deals with several such reflections, ranging from Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) to Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993). Despite differences and the generational distance between them, in some of their best essayistic writings Federman, Barth, Sukenick, and Wallace often focused on the (old) problem of “the new” in art, reframed as a discourse on the making or unmaking of the postmodernist aesthetic in response to a supposed exhaustion of literary language. They did so from a liminal position, namely, from the ambivalent stance of the writer-critic, and ended up producing some of the most penetrating essays on contemporary American literature from the 1960s-1990s, indelibly marking an era in the history of the American essay.