I. Background

1. Social Background (1)-- Radical Changes in the 60's
• the 50's--postwar prosperity; myth of work and family; conformity and repression of women; e.g. girls--taught to be like their mothers--or home economic teacher
• 60's -- political crises  +  youth rebellion
1. political crises:  the Cuban missil crisis; the assassination of JFK, Vietnam war, Watergate
2. social movements: civil rights --> woman's movement -->  the rise of minorities' racial consciousness
3. youth rebellion
• civil rights movement and John Kennedy inspired idealism in college students.
• hippie generation
• Beat generation; e.g. Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

 
2. Social Background (2) -- the Women's Movement --mostly radical feminist activists then.
• Main Concerns: 1. voting; 2. job opportunities; 3. how women are confined at home by childbirth and marriage.
• Fragmentation

 
3. Literary Development: the rise of postmodern fiction
I. Metafiction
• Definition: "Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.  In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text."  (Waugh 2).
• Male writers--John Barth & Kurt Vonnegut
• 1.  Barth: "[one way to come to terms with the difference between art and life] is to define fiction as a kind of true representation of the distortion we all make of life.  In other words, it's a representation of a distortion; not a representation of life....Art is artifice, after all."
• The narrator in Barth's work: "Another story about a writer writing a story!  Another regressus in infinitum!  Who doesn't prefer art that at least overly imitates something other than its own processes?  That doesn't continually proclaim 'Don't forget I'm an aftifice!'?  That takes for granted its mimetic nature instead of asserting it in order (not so slyly after all) to deny it, or vice-versa?  ("Life Story," Lost in the Funhouse, p. 114)
• The narrator in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-V: "There are almost no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.  One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters" (110).

 
II. Historiographic metafiction
• Definition: Historiographic metafiction is one kind of postmodern novel which rejects projecting present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts the specificity and particularity of the individual past event.   It also suggests a distinction between "events" and "facts" that is one shared by many historians.  Since the documents become signs of events, which the historian transmutes into facts, as in historiographic metafiction, the lesson here is that the past once existed, but that our historical knowledge of it is semiotically transmitted. Finally, Historiographic metafiction often points to the fact

by using the paratextual conventions of historiography to both inscribe and undermine the authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations. (122-123, Linda Hutcheon)
 
III. Science Fiction
• Definition: "In utopian fiction a structural three-way splitting always exists between the 'here' of the reader and the narrator and the 'there' of represented possibilities.  . . . " (Bartkowski 14)
• Change: "The earlier utopias, . . . , most often lack any indication of the process of change necessary to move from here to there; . .  .Most contemporary feminist utopian fiction refuses to avoid this very process of transformation--whether economic, sexual, or political" (Bartkowski 14)
• State or family: "Classic utopias of the state, masculinist utopias, as it were, keep the question of the family on the level of an analogy that must finally be sublated" (Bartkowski 15)

 
4. Development of Feminist literature (& the conflicts between Feminism and Postmodernism)
• similarities: challenge authorities; differences in views on history/knowledge and subject.
• Women's positions
• female writers:
• between essentialism and sexual indifference: "Feminists, in other words, walk the fence.  On one side is the slip into the essentialism of humanism, which 'naturally' privileges the subject-as-male, or encourage the feminist to reverse and repeat the binary trap; on the other side is a potential negation of the feminist claim to its own language or home, a politically dangerous stance" (Marshall 13)
• Two literary trends:

1. Constructing "the Liberal Self."  (e.g. confession style. ) -- not our focus
2. Identity in relation: ". . . show less concern with 'splitting' and disintegration than with merging and connection; less interested in the quest of isolated individuals than in positing an individual whose maturity will involve the recognition of her construction through the collective.  (Waugh 32)

1. Stylistically there is a wide range of metafictional traits, from thematic challenges of temporal or human boundaries to the formally experimental ones.
2. Celebration of women's identities and the importance of the private sphere
• e.g. Joan Chase During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1984): the collective "we" as the narrator, the grandmother nicknamed "the Queen of Persia," who rules over her daughters and granddaughters in huge old Ohio farmhouse
• mother-daughter relationships
3. Women and Politics e.g. Joan Didion Democracy; Bobbie Ann Mason In Country
4. Critiquing patriarchy: its gender relations (sexual politics), construction of femininity, etc.
5. Gender inequality + racial/class inequality
6. Time and Space: Women's community set in a certain place and at a certain historical period.
7. All of the above ideas can be expressed through strategies of duality such as irony, magic realism, fantasies, ambivalence, mixing genres, intertextuality, etc.

Bartkowski, Frances.  Feminist Utopias.   Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
Hutcheon, Linda.  A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: 1988.
Marshall, Brenda K.  Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory.  NY: Routledge, 1992.
Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1989.¡@