ABSTRACT
American modernism changed the literary world, eventually on a global basis. Postmodernism, however, came to incorporate wider-ranging cultural concerns. Postmodernist writers were likely to be taking sides—and in the postwar world, sides proliferated. John Barth or Thomas Pynchon become a central nexus, attended by works by Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass—postmodernism appeared to find its root within American experimental fiction. Whether to claim that national origin or to leave the postmodern a global phenomenon seems irrelevant in the midst of these first decades of the twenty-first century. Relying on the reputation of postmodern writing as game, Barth draws on typographical tricks, parodic stream-of-consciousness, and direct address to readers. In 1995 Gass published, his long-awaited novel that would become a classic of the postmodern. When Gass turns his attention to later postmodern works, he describes shifts in the very process of reading. He notes that these are great works of the twentieth-century imagination.
