The Contemporary Period: Postmodernism, Identity, and the Postwar Stage
What this domain tests
1945 to the present: postwar fiction, the postmodern turn, identity-based movements, the Native American Renaissance, contemporary drama, and confessional and protest poetry. The exam usually asks you to apply a period label carefully to a specific book rather than to a decade in general.
Core rules and concepts
- Postwar fiction: Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956, subject of a 1957 obscenity case over City Lights' edition).
- Postmodernism: metafiction, parodic pastiche, unreliable narration, media saturation. Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967), Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), DeLillo's White Noise (1985).
- Southern Gothic and the grotesque: O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952) and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1955); McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985).
- Identity and history: Baldwin's essays and fiction, Morrison's Beloved (1987), which draws on the Margaret Garner case, Walker's The Color Purple (1982), Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984).
- Native American Renaissance: Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), Silko's Ceremony (1977), Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984).
- Drama: Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Wilson's Fences (1985).
Worked example
In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the Misfit says the grandmother "would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Step 1: note the grandmother's final gesture is unselfish, breaking her earlier manipulation. Step 2: note that the story never certifies her salvation; the Misfit's remark reframes grace as violent and unearned. Step 3: connect to O'Connor's Catholic frame, in which grace arrives through the grotesque. Step 4: conclude that the violence is theological argument, not merely regional color.
Traps that cost marks
- Placing Invisible Man in the 1960s; it appeared in 1952.
- Confusing Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968) with Silko's Ceremony (1977).
- Calling Beloved documentary realism; it is ghost story and historical reconstruction together.
- Applying "postmodern" to any recent novel; look for metafiction, pastiche, or ontological play.
- Assuming "Howl" circulated without legal challenge.