Grounding postmodernism.(Editorial)

The editors wish to thank Wayne Lesser for his indispensable help in selecting the essays in this issue.

Our reader for Adam Katz's essay on the late Ronald Sukenick observed "I think the article is hugely valuable for the growing number of ... graduate students who work within post-structuralist premises but are fascinated by writing that, while conscious of matters that we call post-structuralist, exceeds the entailments--aesthetic, political, ideological--of those premises." I would expand this to young critics and add that there is much postmodernist writing that resists orthodox post-structuralist prescriptions by pushing toward transcendence, even to the archangelic figures of Nabokov and Pynchon. Katz sees Sukenick as being as self-reflective as anyone around, but as grounding his metaleptic razzle-dazzle in the forbidden category of experience interpreted by Katz through the sobering perspective of Hannah Arendt. Timothy Gray's "A World without Gravity" shows the logic of the counterintuitive pairing of Jim Carroll, poet, memoirist, rock performer, and former basketball star with Kathleen Norris, poet, memoirist, religious writer, and former Virgin of Bennington. Both sought to ...