ABSTRACT
The fiction of John Edgar Wideman, especially Philadelphia Fire, with its admixture of styles, with its intense narrative fragmentation seems an apt illustration of Harvey’s assertions: the condition of contemporary society involves the ever increasing sense of fragmentation and aesthetic responses which reflect that fragmentation. This novel, along with Sent for You Yesterday, also captures the greater sense of simultaneity, the sense of the condensation of time and space that Harvey asserts as also a part of the condition along with an aesthetic condensation of genres, and one might add, styles. Most if not all the works herein discussed, however, demonstrate similar qualities: the melding of filmic and fictional realities in Players or the melding of mediated melodramas with naturalistic realism in Rechy’s novel. Where it and other works examined in this study differ is that they do not limit their aesthetics to merely mimetic representations of that urban reality. To do so, it seems, would be allow alienation as the primary response. Rather, the writers in this study seek to engage with the urban reality in ways which, while acknowledging alienation, disaffection, and the structural and economic problems of that environment, seek also to capture the possibilities inherent in the city, even as far as the creation of alternate realities, whether through allegory or oral narrative.
