Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction: A Genre Study (American University Studies, Series XIX: General Literature, Vol. 29)

Hardcover, xv + 268 pages, NOT ex-library. Minor handling wear only. Book is clean and bright, untanned, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Rear board yellowed along the edges. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This seminal study bridges the oft-debated chasm between Science Fiction (SF) and postmodern fiction, two genres that, by the mid-20th century, began to interpenetrate and redefine each other's thematic and narrative boundaries. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz meticulously excavates this symbiosis through a series of juxtapositions and contrastive analyses, focusing on pivotal works by Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49), John Brunner (The Productions of Time), Kurt Vonnegut, and William Burroughs. By interrogating genre conventions - such as plot structures, fictional world-building, protagonist archetypes, and temporal manipulations - she unveils how SF's quest for identity, relativity of consciousness, and blurring of illusion/reality converge with postmodernism's metafictional playfulness and ontological skepticism. The book is structured as a methodical exploration: Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork, critiquing existing SF scholarship and justifying a comparative methodology to probe genre borders. Chapter 2 dissects SF's narrative DNA - contrasting Pynchon's paranoiac entropism with Brunner's linear dystopianism - to expose underlying structural patterns (e.g., the axiom of reality, reader-role dynamics, simulacra vs. reality). Chapter 3 traces variations and transcendence of these patterns: how motifs evolve, themes expand, and narrative elements (e.g., time, narrator reliability) are inverted or relativized. Chapter 4 ventures into borderline territories where Vonnegut's satirical humanism and Burroughs' cut-up anarchism dismantle SF/postmodern binaries, signaling a paradigm shift. Puschmann-Nalenz's conclusions are not merely taxonomic but transformative: she repositions SF not as a pulp ghetto but as a theoretically vibrant genre, integral to understanding postmodernity's crisis of representation. By destabilizing rigid genre classifications, this book opens new avenues for literary theory, urging readers to reconceptualize the dialogue between the scientific imagination and the postmodern condition. It stands as a pioneering work in genre studies, challenging scholars to rethink the overlaps, tensions, and synergies between rationality (SF) and absurdity (postmodernism).…