ABSTRACT
No doubt, this interrogative stance, this contesting of authority is partly, at least, a result of the decentered revolt, the “molecular politics” (“Introduction” to Sayres et al. 1984, 4), of the 1960s. I think it would be hard to argue that this challenge to models of unity and order is directly caused by the fact that life today is more fragmented and chaotic; yet many
have done so, claiming that our fiction is bizarre (and even outdated and irrelevant) because life is more bizarre than ever before (Zavarzadeh 1976, 9; Federman 1981b, 6; Hollowell 1977, 4-5; Scholes 1968, 37; Levine 1966). This view has been called simplistic and even lunatic (Newman 1985, 57) in the light of history (both social and literary). But whatever the cause, there have been serious interrogations of those once accepted certainties of liberal humanism.
