Table Of ContentJonathan Franzen at
the End of Postmodernism
Continuum Literary Studies Series
Also available in the series:
Active Reading by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson
Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman
British Fiction in the Sixties by Sebastian Groes
Canonising Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin
Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson
Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton
Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate
Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe
English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins
Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley
Joyce and Company by David Pierce
London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips
Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker
The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida by Ruben Borg
Milton, Evil and Literary History by Claire Colebrook
Modernism and the Postcolonial by Peter Childs
Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and
Naomi Mandel
The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon
Recalling London by Alex Murray
Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy by Simon Swift
Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust by J. M. van der Laan
Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn
Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer
Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips
Jonathan Franzen at
the End of Postmodernism
Stephen J. Burn
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© Stephen J. Burn 2008
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Preface ix
Abbreviations and Note on Editions xv
Chapter 1 A Map of the Territory: American Fiction
at the Millennium 1
Chapter 2 Genealogy: Franzen’s Early Writing 28
Chapter 3 In the Concrete Waste Land: The Twenty-Seventh City 52
Chapter 4 Midnight in the System Rooms: Strong Motion 68
Chapter 5 Millennial Fictions: The Corrections 88
Notes 129
Bibliography of Works by Franzen 141
Works Cited 146
Index 157
Acknowledgements
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and HarperCollins Publishers Ltd have
kindly granted permission to reprint: Excerpts from The Corrections by Jona-
than Franzen Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Franzen; Excerpts from The
Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen. Copyright © 1988 by Jonathan
Franzen; Excerpts from Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen. Copyright ©
1992 by Jonathan Franzen; Excerpts from How to be alone by Jonathan
Franzen. Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Jonathan Franzen; Excerpts from The
Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen. Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan
Franzen.
Preface
Jonathan Franzen occupies a revealing position amongst America’s millen-
nial novelists. While critics at century’s end began to anatomize the end of
postmodernism, mapping “postmodernism’s wake” (Harris), or announc-
ing the emergence of “post-postmodernism” (McLaughlin), the confl ict
between postmodern innovation and more conventional narrative forms
was internalized and played out in Franzen’s novels and essays.1 His work
has tried to absorb the story-based narrative energies of writers such as Isaac
Bashevis Singer and Alice Munro, while it has been simultaneously shaped
and distorted by the achievements of American postmodernism.
Given the recent interest in new directions after postmodernism signaled
by critics such as Charles B. Harris and Robert L. McLaughlin, Franzen’s
attempt to fuse disparate traditions would seem to make a study of his work
particularly timely, but for a variety of reasons his reputation has developed
somewhat unevenly. His novels have often received distractingly overblown
praise from reviewers eager to fi nd and praise a major talent,2 but at the
same time, his work has attracted less serious academic attention than might
be expected. While Franzen is frequently compared to Richard Powers and
the late David Foster Wallace—more prolifi c and more explicitly innovative
writers—there is a notable discrepancy in their critical profi les. Entire
books and special issues of journals have been devoted to explicating
Powers and Wallace’s fi ction,3 but while references to Franzen can often be
found in unusual places—in the British Medical Journal or the Journal of the
American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, for example4—two
decades after the publication of his fi rst novel only a handful of essays solely
devoted to Franzen’s work have appeared.5
Some of the reasons why scholars have overlooked Franzen’s novels aren’t
diffi cult to locate. On a basic level, Franzen’s hostility toward the academy
may have discouraged critics from exploring his relationship to academic
constructions of postmodernism. This is particularly unfortunate, however,
