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 depict 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, in their creation of short stories, also comment on the novels themselves, demonstrating the "metafictional" features of "juxtaposition," "discontinuity," and "randomness."
3. The combination of novels with painting and multimedia creates a sensational effect of "sight, sound, and speech" integration.
4. The blending of science fiction with fiction and historical facts breaks the spatial and temporal boundaries of short fiction.
5. In terms of narrative discourse, they no longer adhere to traditional models. Although the length of short stories is limited, 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 On American Postmodernist Fiction and can also be considered a supplement to this monograph. The book includes 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 "20th-century" postmodernist novelists; the second phase runs from 1971 to 2000, termed the "late" or "21st-century" postmodernist novelists.