SOURCE: "Individual Voice in the Collective Discourse: Literary Innovation in Postmodern American Fiction," in Sub-stance, Vol. 27, 1980, pp. 29-39.

In the following essay, Russell surveys the fiction of several contemporary American authors, including Thomas Pynchon, to convey his belief that postmodernism reflects the ambiguity and self-consciousness of life in the latter half of the twentieth-century.

Since World War II, a new aesthetic and social configuration—the postmodern—has appeared in Europe and the Americas. Studied, but only imprecisely defined, by scholars, artists and writers alike, the postmodern signals a significant change in the nature of the individual's relationship to society. Like the dominant aesthetic traditions of the past 150 years, modernism and the avantgarde, postmodernism displays an alienated, if not antagonistic, response to the aesthetic, ethical and spiritual concerns of bourgeois culture. But with few exceptions, contemporary writing is much less anguished and is narrower in scope than its predecessors...