Abstract

Christopher Witter, BA (Hons.), MA

The American Short Story in the 1960s: Experiment and Social Change
PhD Thesis, Lancaster University
September, 2013

This thesis is an exploration of the experimental American short story in the 1960s
a crucial historical conjuncture, out of which literary postmodernism emerges.
Although this fiction has received critical attention in studies such as Tony Tanners
City of Words (1971), Larry McCafferys Metafictional Muse (1982) and Kasia Boddys
recent The American Short Story since 1950 (2010), my analysis proceeds from the
observation that existing accounts of the historical and political formation of this
literature are conspicuously lacking. Seeking to clarify this historical process, my
account centres on what I call the new American experimental formation.
This literary formation was underpinned by the project of assimilating and extending
the formal innovations of literary modernism. However, this project was fraught from
the outset with difficulties and contradictions. I argue that this formation was chiefly
produced and consumed by the new petty bourgeoisie a new class that emerged
in the postwar period. The formations consolidation proceeded through a set of
gendered, ethnic and class based exclusions. Likewise, these writers appropriations
and renegotiations of modernism were highly selective and often politically
conservative. Nonetheless, the postwar period saw rapid social change brought about
by the elaboration of Fordism and the emergence of new social movements, which
together remapped the boundaries and terms of gender, ethnicity and class. This
process fundamentally shaped the formation and its experimental textual practices.
By taking a long-view, tracing the importance of the legacy of the 1930s to the
formation of the 1960s and its literature, the thesis comes to suggest not only the
necessity of analysing aesthetic strategies as historically and politically situated
social practices, but also provides alternate bases from which to begin constructing
accounts of the exhaustion of literary modernism and the emergence of
postmodernism.

Contents
Declaration
Abstract
Introduction

p.1.

Formations
Preface

p.10.

1: Donald Barthelme: Avant-Garde & Kitsch

p.14.

2: Grace Paley and the Tenement Pastoral

p.37.

3: William H. Gass: Culture & Society

p.56.

New American Experiments

4: The New Writing and the Consolidation of Narratives of Modernism

p.92.

5: Overdetermination:
Modernist Narratives, Ideologemes and Subjectivities
.
6: Twelve from the Sixties: Modernism and its Others

p.116.

7: Tillie Olsens Tell Me a Riddle: Eva Transmitting

p.177.

p.144.

New Petty Bourgeoisie: Aesthetic Fantasies & Social Anxieties

Preface

p.193.

8: John Cheever & Donald Barthelme:

From the Old World to the New World

p.195.

9: John Barth & William H. Gass:

Gendered Allegories of Form

p.220.

10: Donald Barthelme: Rebel Indians

p.247.

Afterword

p.275.

Bibliography

p.281.