¹ For a New Novel, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 19Google Scholar.

² Shake it for the World, Smartass (New York: The Dial Press, 1970), p. 349Google Scholar.

³ Ibid., p. 115.

⁴ Black Humor (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p. xGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Chester, Lewis et al. , An American Melodrama (New York: Viking Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

⁶ ‘You Must be Kidding’, The New Republic, 31 05 1969, pp. 24–5Google Scholar.

⁷ From remarks made by Mailer on 11 February 1966 at Wesleyan University as reported by Levine, Paul in Massachusetts Review, 8 (1967), 518Google Scholar.

⁸ Wiesen, Pearl, letter to the Editor, The New York Times, 19 06 1973, p. 36Google Scholar.

⁹ ‘As the Watergate Turns’, The Village Voice, 7 06 1973, p. 11Google Scholar.

¹⁰ July 1973. p. 44.

¹¹ ‘Comic Relief from the Brown-Bag Man’, The New York Times, 19 07 1973, p. 18Google Scholar.

¹² 5 August 1973, p. 1.

¹³ On technology and ‘Watergate’ see Cohn, Victor's incisive commentary, ‘Watergate Bug Infects Technologyg’, Technology Review, 07/08 1973, pp. 5–6Google Scholar. The eeriness of ‘Watergate’ is enacted in Thompson, Hunter S.'s ‘Fear and Loathing at the Watergate’, Rolling Stones, 27 09 1973, pp. 31–8, 73–81Google Scholar. The major record companies are now working hard on plans to market the Nixon tapes!

¹⁴ ‘Writing American Fiction’, Commentary, 03 1961, p. 221Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Sarraute, Nathalie, The Age of Suspicion, trans. Jolas, M. (New York: George Braziller, 1963), p. 57Google Scholar.

¹⁶ A Gathering of Fugitives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), p. 125Google Scholar.

¹⁷ I am using this term to refer to a cluster of attitudes which have emerged since the mid-1950s. I shall use the term ‘metamodernist’ in conjunction with three others to describe various aesthetic and ideational approaches to the art of narrative in the present century. I retain ‘Modernist’ for the ideas associated with Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and their followers. The reaction against their poetics in the 1950s by such writers as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and C. P. Snow I label ‘Anti-Modernist’. The modified and sometimes radicalized continuation of the Modernist aesthetics in the works of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and others I shall call ‘Para-Modernist’.

Some critics use the single term ‘Post-modern’ to describe these new developments. However the term is too general to catch all the nuances. Hassan, Ihab's Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971)Google Scholar, for example, discusses Kafka with Hemingway and Beckett, boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature (1972– ) has a grab-bag approach to recent writing, covering such an assortment of items as to make the term synonymous with ‘post-war literature’. Graff, Gerald's ‘the myth of postmodern breakthrough’, in TriQuarterly (no. 26, pp. 383–414)Google Scholar lumps together everything published since the decline of the Proust-Mann-Joyce-Pound-Eliot tradition.

¹⁸ Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus.

¹⁹ Bergonzi, Bernard, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 12Google Scholar.

²⁰ ‘The Novel in the Post-Political World’, Partisan Review, 23 (1956), 358Google Scholar.

²¹ ‘Culture Now’, Modern Occasions, 1 (1971), 162–78Google Scholar; and ‘Distractions of a Fiction Writer’, in The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Hicks, Granville (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 1–20Google Scholar.

²² This re-routing, significantly enough, has become one of the recurring themes and controlling metaphors in recent writings. See, for example, Sukenick, Ronald's The Death of the Novel and other Stories (1970)Google Scholar.

²³ In their book, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, Scholes and Kellogg maintain that the novel is breaking down into its constituent elements (p. 15). Mary McCarthy also relates the transformation of the post-war novel to this disintegration process (On the Contrary, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961, p. 270Google Scholar).

²⁴ Gass, William, Fiction and Figures of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 25Google Scholar. See also Barth, John, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, Atlantic, 08 1967, pp. 29–34Google Scholar; and Scholes, Robert, ‘Metafiction’, The Iowa Review, 1 (1970), 100–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Scholes, Robert, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 43Google Scholar.

²⁶ For a description of the theoretical model on which this definition is based, see my paper, ‘A Typology of Prose Narrative’, in Journal of Literary Semantics, 3 (1974)Google Scholar.

²⁷ An Introduction to American Literature (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Ken tucky, 1971), p. 73Google Scholar.

²⁸ See Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950)Google Scholar, and Angrist, Stanley and Helper, Loren G., Order and Chaos: Laws of Energy and Entropy (New York: Basic Books, 1967)Google Scholar.

²⁹ New American Review, 10 (1970), 46Google Scholar.

³⁰ ‘Littérature littérale’, Critique, 100–101 (09–10, 1955), 820–6Google Scholar.

³¹ Programme honouring Cage's sixtieth birthday in the New School on Friday, 30 June 1972.

³² Sypher, Wylie, Literature and Technology (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 240Google Scholar.

³³ I wish to thank Teresa L. Ebert of the University of Oregon for reading this paper before submission, and to acknowledge that the extract from ‘You Must be Kidding’ by Larry L. King on pp. 71–2 is reprinted by permission of THE NEW REPUBLIC, © 1969, The New Republic, Inc.