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Daniel Grausam. On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. vii + 196 pp.
Over the past five years, a number of monographs have been published on the subject of nuclear representations in literature. From Daniel Cordle's States of Suspense (2008) to Paul Williams's Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War (2011), the end of the twentieth century has done nothing to reduce the proliferation of the atomic referent as a lens through which scholars approach the contemporary period. If the 1984 special issue of diacritics on "Nuclear Criticism" failed to institute a cohesive field of study surrounding the atomic bomb, the recent interest in nuclear issues suggests it may be time to revisit this possibility.
Grausam situates his book as part of the critical movement seeking to undermine the postmodernist claim to ahistoricity. Siding with Linda Hutcheon in the well-trodden debate with Fredric Jameson over postmodern fiction's "historical depthlessness" versus its "historiographic metafictionality," Grausam affirms the latter and argues for a reading of postmodern literature as shaped by the apocalyptic sensibility of the atomic bomb. The notion that the world could end instantaneously in a nuclear holocaust poses "representational challenges" (16) to our understanding of temporality: there may actually be no future. For Grausam, these challenges manifest in the form of the postmodern movement, which he regards as a mass representational strategy for addressing this new world order. "Postmodernist fiction is," Grausam tells us, "the literary symptom of new understandings of space and time produced by the nuclear age with which it coincided" (4).
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