This chapter focuses on the canonical essays that theorized in real time the new stylistic and thematic tendencies in American postmodern fiction. Since the late 1960s, prominent practitioners of postmodernist fiction have been at the forefront of critical debates over contemporary American narrative. From the 1960s to the 1990s, brilliant authors such as Raymond Federman, John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, and David Foster Wallace engaged in essayistic reflections on the problem of innovation in American fiction, including Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” and Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Despite differences and generational distance, in some of their best essayistic writing these writers often focused on the (old) problem of “the new” in art, reframed as a discourse on the making or unmaking of the postmodernist aesthetic in response to a supposed exhaustion of literary language. They did so from a liminal position, namely from the ambivalent stance of the writer-critic, and ended up producing some of the most penetrating essays on contemporary American literature during this period, indelibly marking an era in the history of the American essay.

For Aristotle, the main thing to grasp about a child is what it is not – a creature that has not yet reached the age of reason: childish. But Heraclitus had exploited that ‘deficit’ view of childhood to create characteristic paradoxes in which he exhibits children as however also wiser and sharper than adults. In one of his most enigmatic aphorisms (Fr. 52), he represents the dynamism that propels and sustains us right through life as that of a child at play. After analysis of that paradox and other Heraclitean sayings about children, the chapter turns to Plato’s interest in children and their play, and to his no less paradoxical thesis in the Laws that what, if anything, is truly serious in human life is playful activity, conceived as participation in the ordered play of the gods. We see here an anticipation of Huizinga’s thesis (in Homo Ludens) that in application of the concept of play lies the route to understanding not only children’s games and the place of sport in the lives of adults, but all of what may be regarded as the higher forms of culture, not least law and religious ritual.

Bakhtin's work continually develops, but on the basis of a few enduring concerns. The first of these is the belief that the fate of Europe depends on a new conception of historical life as an 'ethical reality', which is structured by the prospect of a messianic future. The second is the claim that this ethical reality depends on a crucial distinction between I and other. Finally, Bakhtin believes that this relationship is embodied in the form of literary works and their language, which transforms our everyday experience of the world into language and narrative that embodies 'historical becoming', the form history takes when it is ethical. Bakhtin's linguistic turn in the late 1920s focuses on how a new novelistic style infuses social language with this historical sense: double-voiced discourse recreates language as what Bakhtin calls 'social heteroglossia', which teems with historical becoming. But double-voiced discourse is always reliant on new kinds of narrative form, which probe and shape the'languages' of the novel. Bakhtin's work from the late 1930s onwards is a sustaned effort to describe and specify the narrative forms that convey historical becoming.