SOURCE: "Writing about Postmodern Writing," in Poetics Today, Vol. 3, No. 3, Summer, 1982, pp. 211-27.

In the following omnibus review of several critical works on postmodernist literature, McHale finds similarities and differences among the conclusions drawn by Christine Brooke-Rose, Christopher Butler, Anne Jefferson, and Alan Wilde.

"Postmodern"? No such word appears in the index of Ann Jefferson's book on the nouveau roman,¹ nor does it occur in the chapters that Christine Brooke-Rose devotes to contemporary French writing. Yet Brooke-Rose's index² does give a number of page-references under "postmodern (postmodernism, postmodernist)," including two entire chapters. All these contexts turn out to be discussions of contemporary American writing: for Brooke-Rose, "postmodernism" is the name of an exclusively American school or movement. But even having restricted it in this way, she is not much satisfied with this equivocal term: "postmodernism," she writes,

is a sort of English equivalent to nouveau nouveau, for it...