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Shows how competing ideas about the reader in US literature and literary theory of the late 1960s and '70s reconfigured both reading practices and our understanding of the novel as art.
Despite claims that theory is a relic of a previous era of literary study, theory's fundamental assumptions persist in the belief that we as readers take an active role in the production of the meaning of the work of art. To make this case, Mode of Address returns to the 1960s and '70s to reevaluate competing attitudes about the reader in some ambitious novels and influential literary theory of the era. Examining figures such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Joan Didion, William H. Gass, John Hawkes, and Ishmael Reed alongside postmodern standard-bearers such as John Barth, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, Davis Smith-Brecheisen reveals how efforts to refuse or appeal to the reader revised and extended the modernist artwork's pursuit of autonomy. Exploring the era's conflicting positions about the reader, Smith-Brecheisen demonstrates that the epistemological aims of theory and the demands of literature are not as neatly aligned as many have maintained. Looking at recent works by authors such as Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, Smith-Brecheisen further demonstrates that this tension continues to shape contemporary reading practices and our understanding of the novel as art.
"A serious and important work, Mode of Address makes two immediate interventions into the field of postmodern literature. First, it overturns the almost axiomatic view that postmodernism represents a rejection of modernist autonomy in favor of a notion of the open text. Rather, the problems of modernism persist into the postmodern period, becoming the grounds out of which postmodernism produces its own aesthetic solutions. At the same time, the book challenges readings of postmodern literature and poststructuralist theory as more or less homologous. While these two forms of discourse attend to the same issue—the relationship of the epistemological work of reading to the ontological structure of the work of art—they come at it in distinct ways. What makes the argument especially compelling is its attention to textual detail and to the shifting relations among reader, text, and author." — Paul Stasi, editor of Realism and the Novel: A Global History