ABSTRACT
Jonathan Lethem acute reflection sets a keynote for the present essay. The present essay thus offers a contribution to the field of inquiry evoked by David James in The Legacies of Modernism: an engagement with the stylistic, thematic and political afterlives of the formal and intellectual ambitions of literary modernism. James work has strongly participated in a new interest in the continuities from modernism through postwar writing and into contemporary literature. James proposes that a number of contemporary novelists have engaged with modernist methods and would hardly identify themselves as postmodern. Among contemporary writers, one suggest that Lorrie Moore is one in whose work these impulses have resonance. Science fiction has been a significant site for the modern imagination of alterity. Specifically, in contemplating the question of how non-human life forms might communicate, science fiction writers have been able to reimagine our own language. The zone of linguistic alterity in Motherless Brooklyn is not difficult to discern.
