Usure yuku Kyokai-sen (The Fading Borderlines - Exploring American Contemporary Novels)

This volume is a review that attempts to sketch a “floor plan” of American contemporary novels. An examination of existing reviews and research on American contemporary novels reveals that those dealing with the period up to the 1980s focus on metafiction, while those dealing with the 1990s and later are primarily about ethnic literature. The discussion in this volume agrees with these historical divisions but strives to maintain a bird’s-eye view that encompasses both.
 
Based on this approach, each chapter features novels of various genres and types that have colored the contemporary American literary scene, introducing several writers representative of each. Generally, I include at least one writer active during the Cold War and one after the Cold War for a glimpse into the development of each genre and the changes according to the times. These “principles” are not applied in all chapters partly because the novels popular during the Cold War often became less popular afterward or because the types of novels not prominent (or that were seldom written) before the Cold War might have become popular afterward.
 
This transition inevitably imbues the volume’s discussion with a “postwar literary history” character. This is also true of the structure of the volume as a whole, with the first half focusing on various types of novels, including so-called “genre novels,” mainly written by white authors, while the second half deals with “ethnic literature.” This arrangement is because the rise of ethnic literature is a prominent feature of post-Cold War American literature (although it began during the Cold War).
 
The title of this volume derives from the attempt to view American literature from the latter half of the 20th century onward through the lens of a struggle over “fading borderlines.” The end of World War II and the start of the Cold War created a deep boundary between the United States and the Communist bloc. However, economic prosperity and social movements caused domestic (existing) boundaries to disappear. With the end of the Cold War and the advent of the Internet, a visually apparent acceleration of globalization blurred the outline=boundaries of “America” itself. The disappearance of boundaries leads to a blurring of identity outline=boundaries, which is consistent with the popular belief that the “modern ego” was diluted in the postmodern era. This volume aims to sketch a “floor plan” of how “novels” as products of “modernity” have changed in response to such times.
 

(Written by SUWABE Koichi, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2023)