The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives

Abstract

Recent American experimental fiction, in response to the fictive behaviour of the emerging realities of a technetronic culture, moves beyond the interpretive modernist novel in which the fictionist interpreted the ‘ human condition ’ within the framework of a comprehensive private metaphysics, towards a metamodern narrative with zero degree of interpretation. The mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘ reality ’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd.