American Literature / Unit 16 AML 1543 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Sorting Postwar Fiction by Its School
The idea
Four groupings cover most of what the board asks about this period. The Southern writers, O'Connor, Welty and McCullers, work in gothic settings with violence, dark comedy and a religious or ethical frame. The Jewish-American novelists, Bellow, Malamud, Roth and Singer, are marked by humour, ethical concern and portraits of Jewish communities in the old world and the new. The suburban realists, Cheever, Updike and O'Hara, examine the stress lurking in the shadows of apparent satisfaction. The postmodernists, Pynchon, Barth and Barthelme, attend to how a story is told rather than to the story. Two writers sit across the lines: Nabokov, an emigre stylist who fed the postmodernists, and Ellison and Baldwin, whose subject is identity rather than ambition.
In practice
Southern, Jewish-American, suburban, postmodern.
Where people slip
The groupings are the witness's, not a formal movement each writer joined. Several names could be filed in two of them.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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