Preface

Acknowledgments

Postmodernism's Polytropic Imagination: Unwriting/Rewriting the Cold War Narratives of Polarization

Saying ``Poh! to Simple Quadrilaterals'': Innovative Fiction and the Quest for an Alternative Narrative and Cultural Imagination

Learning to Live with Postmodernism's Subversive Demon: From an Agonistic to a Transactive Model of Narrative Innovation

Rewriting History's ``Ghoststories'': The Bifurcated Focus of Innovative Fiction

Innovative Fiction in the Post--Cold War Transition: Charting a Course beyond the Master Plots of Globalization and ``End of History''

Innovative Responses to the Metanarratives of Modern History: Polysystemic Fiction, Surfiction, and the Postmodern Feminist Novel

When the ``Mystery of Reason'' Confronts the ``Mystery of Desire'': The Rearticulation of History in Polysystemic Fiction

Narrative as an ``Interventive'' Mode: From Surfiction to Avant-Pop

Revisionistic Narratives from the Interstices of the Cold War: Postmodern Feminist Fiction

``Chain of Links'' or ``Disorderly Tangle of Lines''? Alternative Cartographies of Modernity in Thomas Pynchon's Fiction

``Wreck[ing] the Elegant Rooms of History'': Pynchon's Polysystemic Revisions of History from the Enlightenment to the Cold War

From Paternalistic Orders to Dissonant Worlds of Sons and Daughters: V. and The Crying of Lot 49

Breaking Out of the ``Fussy Biedermeier Strangulation'' of Western Thought: Marginocentric Characters and Projects in Gravity's Rainbow

Narrative Transgression and Rearticulation in the Age of Global Networks: Vineland

Surveying Modernity's ``Crimes of Demarcation'': Revisionistic Cartographies in Pynchon's (Post-)Colonial Epic Mason & Dixon

Interventive Writing in the ``Post-Human'' Age: Experiential and Cultural Rearticulation in Ronald Sukenick's Fiction

Realigning the Truth of Experience with the Truth of the Page: Sukenick's Generative Concept of Fiction

``Cultivate the Unexpected'': The Techniques of Improvisation and Metamorphosis

``Stream Language'' vs. Mimetic Language: The Benefits and Failings of an Experiential Poetics

``The Mute Articulation of the Conditions We Live in''

``Repatriating'' Fiction from the ``Realm of Determinism to that of Potential'': A Dialectic of Unwriting/Rewriting

Narrative (Dis-)Articulation in the ``Shadowbox'' of History: Raymond Federman's Exploratory Surfiction

Fiction under the Sign of Saturn: Reimagined Truth vs. Factual Verisimilitude

How to Re-Place Life: Revisionistic Strategies of Storytelling

Extricating a ``Real-Fictitious'' Story from the Jumble of Postwar History: Federman's Existential and Cultural Explorations

Imagining the Story Properly: Freedom of Invention vs. Narrative Closure

``Exile[d] into this Recitation'': Voices vs. Texts

Translating a History of ``Unspeakable'' Otherness into a Discourse of Empowered ``Choices'': Toni Morrison's Novels of Radical Rememory

``Rip[ping] the Veil'' of Color and Gender: Black Women's Search for Subjecthood in The Bluest Eye and Sula

Interrogating Oppositional Paradigms: Hybrid Identities and Ethnic Histories in Song of Solomon and Tar Baby

``Unspeakable Thoughts'' Spoken: Reclaiming the Other's History in Beloved

The Past is Not a Repetitive Record: The Remaking of African American History from the Great Migrations to the Civil Rights Era (Jazz and Paradise)

Epilogue Exploring the Ignored Outskirts of the Art of Telling: Innovative Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium

Works Cited

Index