Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism

by Stephen J. Burn

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists.  This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism.  Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Genres: Literary Criticism, American, Nonfiction, Criticism, Essays

159 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[E. C. Koch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burn’s Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism sits nicely next to Herren’s The Self-Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo and Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace, as all are works that concentrate on a single author (i.e., a monograph) and extrapolate how that author’s fiction indicates a movement in literary thinking and so then also registers a change in cultural thinking. If Herren’s task is hard because he has to deal with so much material, Burn’s and Boswell’s tasks are hard because they have so little material to work with. And then, whereas Burn – it would turn out – was dealing with Wallace’s best work, I think Burn had to work hard to glean the meaning from Franzen’s first two novels (The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion) which were, shall we say, uneven, before getting to his longest chapter on Franzen’s best early novel, The Corrections (I’d love supplementary chapters on Freedom and Crossroads). Burn argues that Franzen’s fiction, along with his contemporaries, Wallace and Powers, indicates a simultaneous indebtedness to postmodernism and desire to transcend certain tendencies of postmodernism. Burn refers to this aspect of Franzen’s fiction as double vision, and so locates in Franzen’s first three novels how this double vision translates into highly intricate formal demonstrations of literary fiction’s gradual entry into “post-postmodernism” (a term that Burn unenthusiastically supports here). It’s in these latter chapters that Burn touches on two of what I see to be major aspects of popomo fiction (let’s not call it that, okay?): the balance between traditional realism and recent experimentalism (what Smith calls “compromise aesthetics”), and the more radical shift in ontology away from the language-oriented view of the world that postmodernists endorsed and toward an intuitive material sense of the world. I think that Burn is right on the money here, and I also think that there are more obvious authors/texts to illustrate these ideas than Franzen/The Twenty-Seventh City/Strong Motion. For my own purposes, Burn’s first two chapters were the most useful, but, altogether, Burn offers a solid critical stepping-stone that helps us out of the pomo morass.

[Matthew Balliro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Chapters 1 and 5 of this book (they're the only ones that really play into my research right now). Prof. Burn has an encyclopedic knowledge of recent American literature and writes with a clear, distinctive voice. This book isn't just for Franzen fans--much of Burn's argument has to do with the characteristics of what he identifies as "post-postmodernism--but Franzen is, of course, the central focus. As soon as I knock off Franzen's other novels, I'm sure I'll read the rest of this!