The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction

“The novel is dead” was the cry of the 1960s, and so it was as an authoritative report concerning the world; but from that death, Klinkowitz argues, arose a form of writing that celebrates the crea­tive process, a narrative that is not about something but is something.

Klinkowitz first characterizes the “modern” fiction of the earlier 20th cen­tury wherein the word fades into the background because the story line forms the essence of the fiction. Thus the word is “self-effacing.” Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, features the word. Words in postmodern fiction are opaque, not transparent. Of necessity we notice the word and must look closely at it; thus the word becomes “self-apparent.”

Jerome Klinkowitz is Professor of En­glish at the University of Northern Iowa. The present book provides the theory to accompany his literary history (Literary Disruptions, 1975) and his cultural sur­vey (The American 1960s, 1980).