Conte: Postmodern American Fiction

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Conte, Joseph. _Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American 
Fiction_. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

"[... Conte] examines numerous authors, prominent among them John 
Hawkes, Kathy Acker, Don Delillo, and Thomas Pynchon. His theory of 
postmodern literature, like Fredric Jameson's, envisions a permanent 
and irreparable breach between modernist and postmodernist works. Using 
Thomas Kuhn's proposal that scientific progress proceeds via radical 
paradigm shifts, Conte asserts modernist science and literature have 
been superceded by the new paradigm of postmodern science and 
literature. Citing authors ranging from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot and 
Wallace Stevens, Conte reads modernism and traditional science as part 
of an outmoded paradigm which obsessively seeks to order reality 
because of a latent fear of disorder and unpredictability. This results 
in a modernist 'pohtical aesthetic whose concern for centering control 
approaches fascism' (2002, 11). [...]"

 From the review (pdf) by Jeffrey Ebbesen in _College Literature_ 32.2, 
Spring 2005, pp. 192-4.

best