ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any other two writers who published novels in the first twenty years after World War II, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon changed the aesthetic of the novel in the U.S. In Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and the works of Pynchon, there is a decided movement away from the realism, naturalism, and modernist aesthetics that had previously dominated urban novels, as well as literary fiction at large. Although Ellison’s novel is set in an indeterminate time while Pynchon’s work is clearly set in the postwar world, both incorporate aspects of contemporary culture, such as music and movies, that tend to be disparaged if noted at all in prewar literary fiction. Along with the mythic aspects of modernism, they incorporate folklore and legends found on the street in a melding of high and low culture. Through this method they create sometimes surreal, sometimes fabulistic time-spaces to counter what they see as the dominant American modes of perception, to open up new, more expansive ways of perceiving both the urban and the American reality.
