历史进程中的美国后现代主义文学

American Literary Postmodernism in the Progression of History

美国的后现代主义文学国内外的讨论颇多,但是将它放在美国二战后的历史进程这一语境下来关照的,却鲜有为之。文章力图说明美国后现代主义文学独特的发展轨迹,并论证美国的后现代主义文学就是美国二战后历史进程的结果。它于20世纪50年代在战后的"敲打"中孕育,于"长久的60年代"在形式试验中登上顶峰,于20世纪70年代末和80年代在通俗化迈进中衰弱,至20世纪90年代便逐渐消亡并于"9·11"被埋葬在世贸大楼的瓦砾里。后现代主义之后谁最风流?后后现代主义或其他?在后现代主义文学的旧王已死新王尚未即位之际,尚不能有确切的答案,能做的只是寻找新的定义和方向。

Numerous books and papers have been written on American postmodern literature, but few have touched upon it in terms of the progression of American history after World War II. This paper intends to contextualize the evolution of American postmodern literature, holding that its development is the outcome of post-World War II social conditions. Namely, it was born with the ＂beats＂ in the 1950s, reached its peak in ＂the long sixties＂ with a great enthusiasm for formal experiments, began to wane in the late 1970s and 1980s with a growing tendency to use popular genres in creation, was dying out in the 1990s, and lay buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. With postmodernism gone, is it time for a new ism-late postmodernism, post-postmodernism, or Digimodernism？ To this question we have no definite answer, for we are now right in a period of Interregnum when we can only look for new definitions and directions.