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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
American fiction in the years from 1950 to 1970 may be read as a continuing dialogue between writers married to a variety of traditional forms and attitudes and writers who embraced a number of avant-garde positions. Often this dialogue grows sharp and shrill, spilling over from works of fiction into manifesto, polemic, or criticism, and the relationship between these two groups looks more like a battle than a dialogue—a new battle of the books. The traditionalists are on the defensive generally, falling back a little querulously on humanistic positions derived from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which yielded a man-centered value system, an empirical epistemology, and a mimetic and teleological aesthetic, all of which seem less certain and more ambiguous than they used to. The modernists, heirs to the movement for which James Joyce may stand as a symbol, are the aggressors, announcing in their proclamations the liquidation of the art of the past and taking a nihilistic attitude toward traditional values and forms, espousing a cult of novelty, conceiving of art as a plaything, and pushing their experimentalism possibly toward self-ruin and silence; in short, behaving like traditional avant-gardists. To understand the terms of this dialogue, or the lines of this battle, is to understand more than the tensions between the two camps and more than the substance and form of the fiction written in each. It is to understand certain major cultural phenomena from which this battle issues and which it illustrates and documents.
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