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...