ABSTRACT
The dynamics of tracing the original postmodern impetus in the craft of American fiction is as convoluted as the individual careers of the authors associate with the movement. The author, Barth as character, uses the term "print fiction", or sometimes "p-fiction," seeing it as an endangered species. As he describes the turn into the twenty-first century, Barth compares the debacle that Y2K might have become to Biblical floods and plagues; even as he pretends that mysterious happenings in the electronic world cannot touch the American writer, his fiction has little direction. Don DeLillo has explored more generic forms, more choices of narrators, and more themes in his career as novelist than have most of his postmodern colleagues. Postmodern in that there are some authorial interventions, as when David Foster Wallace points out that the narrative is set in the Rome, New York, Northeast Regional Examination Center, as he states calmly, "All of this is true.
