Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure That the Genre Exists

By MICHAEL BERUBE

I have a confession to make. For over 10 years now, I've been offering a course called "Postmodernism and American Fiction" as an undergraduate honors seminar and on the graduate level. I usually assign a range of contemporary novelists, from well-known figures like Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Toni Morrison to relatively unsung writers like Richard Grossman (author of The Alphabet Man and The Book of Lazarus) and Randall Kenan (A Visitation of Spirits). I also