outline_us_lit

nist. What is often called “chick lit”is a flourishing offshoot. BridgetJones’s Diary by the British writerHelen Fielding and CandaceBushnell’s Sex and the City featuringurban single women withromance in mind have spawned apopular genre among youngwomen.Nonfiction writers also examinethe phenomenon of post-feminism.The Mommy Myth (2004) by SusanDouglas and Meredith Michaelsanalyzes the role of the media inthe “mommy wars,” while JenniferBaumgardner and Amy Richards’lively ManifestA: Young Women,Feminism, and the Future (2000)discusses women’s activism inthe age of the Internet. CaitlinFlanagan, a magazine writer whocalls herself an “anti-feminist,”explores conflicts between domesticlife and professional life forwomen. Her 2004 essay in TheAtlantic, “How Serfdom Saved theWomen’s Movement,” an accountof how professional womendepend on immigrant women of alower class for their childcare, triggeredan enormous debate.It is clear that American literatureat the turn of the 21st centuryhas become democratic and heterogeneous.Regionalism has flowered,and international, or “global,”writers refract U.S. culture throughforeign perspectives. Multiethnicwriting continues to mine richveins, and as each ethnic literaturematures, it creates its own traditions.Creative nonfiction andmemoir have flourished. The shortPostmodernauthorsquestion externalstructures,whether political,philosophical, orartistic. Theytend to distrustthe masternarrativesofmodernistthought, whichthey seeas politicallysuspect.story genre has gained luster, andthe “short” short story has takenroot. A new generation of playwrightscontinues the American traditionof exploring current socialissues on stage. There is not spacehere in this brief survey to do justiceto the glittering diversity ofAmerican literature today. Instead,one must consider general developmentsand representative figures.POSTMODERNISM,CULTURE AND IDENTITYPostmodernism suggests fragmentation:collage, hybridity,and the use of various voices,scenes, and identities. Postmodernauthors question external structures,whether political, philosophical,or artistic. They tend todistrust the master-narratives ofmodernist thought, which theysee as politically suspect.Instead, they mine popular culturegenres, especially sciencefiction, spy, and detective stories,becoming, in effect, archaeologistsof pop culture.Don DeLillo’s White Noise,structured in 40 sections likevideo clips, highlights the dilemmasof representation: “Werepeople this dumb before television?”one character wonders.David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan(1,000 pages, 900 footnotes)Infinite Jest mixes up wheelchairboundterrorists, drug addicts,and futuristic descriptions of acountry like the United States. InGalatea 2.2, Richard Powers interweavessophisticated technology137