Abstract: David Brauner. Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. vii + 236 pp. $90.00/$30.00.In many ways, David Brauner's most recent book picks up where he left off in 2007's Philip Roth. In earlier publication, Brauner placed Roth's more recent work in conversation with several other works of contemporary American fiction in order to examine more closely analogous functions of paradox. In Contemporary American Fiction (2010), published as part of Edinburgh University Press Critical Guides to Literature Series, Brauner continues in vein, bringing together a diverse collection of American novels span a period of approximately twenty years, from Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) to Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005). Careful to avoid any attempt to manipulate such a wide range of fiction to fit a single overarching thesis, Brauner nevertheless uses paradox, as he did in Philip Roth, as a centering focus for his own perceptions of what is most valuable in contemporary American fiction (14).Brauner sets parameters of contemporary American fiction in his study to include prose works written by American-born from mid- 1980s 2005, and he strives to demonstrate simultaneously both diversity exists across those works and the affinities exist between many of authors (15). In doing so, Brauner seeks to combat what he the 'post-mania' of recent academic discourse, which he believes to be a misleading trend ignores the reality of contemporary American fiction and of contemporary America by relegating to history still problematic such as race and gender, through simple expedient of attaching prefix 'post-' to them (14). In countering this post-mania, Brauner fashions an insightful if (as he himself admits) not wholly comprehensive study of works by a range of notable American authors, successfully demonstrating central paradox of contemporary American fiction: that in very process of challenging conventional ideas of irony, gender, race, and nationality, it reinstates centrality of these terms (15).In his examination of Roth's The Human Stain (2000), for example, Brauner forgoes lengthy literature reviews and more extensive textual analysis present in his earlier study; nevertheless, similarities he draws between Roth's novel, Gish Jen's Mona in Promised Land (1996), and Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing (2003) enriches his examination of ambiguity of Jewishness (153). All three novels, Brauner reminds us, follow protagonists who seek to situate themselves outside ordinary parameters of racial categories, and who also represent inherent paradox at heart of culture in which novels are set. In short, Brauner argues even as these novels radically challenge very notion of race, they partly reinstate it, since they must repeatedly cite term, implicitly reinforcing 'normative notions' nomenclature of race assumes (109). Drawing in part from Eric Sundquist's 2005 study Strangers in Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, Brauner also situates his study of these novels within context of post-war tensions between blacks and Jews in America, examining how each author deploys interracial tension to interrogate language of multiculturalism in America. For example, The Human Stain, according to Brauner, is a scathing critique of identity politics, and only in language of paradox is it possible for Coleman Silk, a black man passing as a Jew, to be both agent of cultural change at Athena College and also its victim, as new era of multiculturalism he helps to usher in ultimately destroys him (124-25). Mona Chang, Gish Jen's Chinese-American-Jewish female protagonist, and German-Jewish-African-American Strom family of Richard Powers's novel suffer much same fate, as their struggles, like those of Coleman Silk, point to complications and paradoxes arising from hybridized racial and ethnic identities. …
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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