Selection of Postmodern Short Stories from America

Author: Yang Renjing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: Looking at the twenty-five short stories selected in this book, what are the characteristics of American postmodernist short fiction?
1. The characters they portray are mostly "anti-heroes," with simple backgrounds and "unknown origins." Sometimes their experiences are omitted, or they are even nameless and faceless. The characters' images are blurred, and their personalities are lost.
2. The authors, while creating the short stories, also comment on the fiction itself, demonstrating the "metafictional" features of "juxtaposition," "discontinuity," and "randomness."
3. The combination of fiction with painting and multimedia creates a sensational effect of "visual, auditory, and verbal" integration.
4. The blending of science fiction with fiction and historical facts breaks the temporal and spatial boundaries of short fiction.
5. In narrative discourse, they no longer adhere to traditional models. Despite the limited length of short stories, American postmodernist novelists have boldly experimented, striving to break free from the constraints of traditional and modernist fiction, making the form of the novel diverse and covering all aspects of social life.
Selected Short Stories of American Postmodernist Fiction is a companion volume to our National Social Science Fund Project A Study of American Postmodernist Fiction and can also be considered a supplement to this monograph. The book features twenty-five works by eighteen authors, with a focus on the second phase of writers. American postmodernist novelists can generally be divided into two phases: The first phase spans from 1961 to 1970, known as the "early" or first-generation postmodernist novelists; the second phase runs from 1971 to 2000, referred to as the "late" or second-generation postmodernist novelists.