Status Updates From American Fictions 1940-1980...

Somewhat Experimental: Abish, Sorrentino, Doctorow

Styron. Still a thing?

Don't care to read about Mailer either.

No DeLillo in the index!?!?

Karl oughta say nicer things about Vonnegut.

Don't much care to read about Bellow or Roth. Skimming.

LETTERS.

The Female Experience

"The Possibilities of Minimalism". None.

AI folk need to read McElroy's Plus. And Heidegger, of course.

Karl says “total novel”. Sound familiar?

13 long pages on McElroy lend Karl considerable credibility.

Two paragraphs, your patience please. But Karl is sketching this forty year period of american fiction exactly as I have been doing for, well, not quite as long. Yes, it’s true, there are two kinds of writers.......

Lots of plot/character/theme analysis here. Reminds me of my membership in the Hawkes' Enemies of Fiction School (even if its founder later recanted). Maybe I'll do a little more skimmish=reading. But really excellent that he correctly identifies the Milestones ; things like LETTERS &c ;; McElroy is prominent ;; but peeked ahead and found that he's wrong about Federman.

Purdy? Please to inform.

On my fred-karl shelf I'm notating those books Karl mentions which, if not BURIED, are under=read and which he indicates may be of some fictional value. For instance, should you be seeking out novels by African=Americans, there have been at least several so far. William Demby, for instance.

Ms Young is not in the index....

Not to overstate things, but I suspect that Karl's thesis is something to the effect that what I endearingly call postmodern fiction is just modernism coming late to the USofA. He seems to herald only Faulkner as competent to stand with the europeans of that earlier era. Also, those south americans beat us to modernism too. America, land of the late=arrivals!

"He is pure Being, as against Nothingness, which he brushes. A Heideggerian sense of Being exists, in that Croft attempts to transcend human 'being' to achieve pure Being, and yet runs up against the fact that 'being' in its temporality restrains 'Being,' which lies outside time."

Which is utter=utter nonsense.

I'm reading this because maybe it's good for me.