Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-223) and index.

1. Introduction: The Postmodern, the Marginal, and the Minor. Postmodernism and the Decentered Subject. Social Marginality and Minor Literature. Modernist Alienation/Postmodern Fragmentation -- 2. Signification, Movement, and Resistance in the Novels of Nathanael West. Moving Violation. How to Say Things with Words. The System of Movement and Its Discontents. The Significance of the Motion Picture -- 3. Anais Nin, Djuna Barnes, and the Critical Feminist Unconscious. Female Self-Fashioning in Nin's "Continuous Novel" Theorizing Women's Divided Experience. The Feminine Condition and Existential Angst in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood -- 4. Gwendolyn Brooks and the Vicissitudes of Black Female Subjectivity. Beyond the Sex/Gender System: The Complex Construction of Feminine Identity. Two Brooks "Mothers" and the Politics of Identification. Maud Martha and the Issue of Black Women's Anger -- 5. "To Become One and Yet Many"; Psychic Fragmentation and Aesthetic Synthesis in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Reflections on the Black Subject. The Collective Entity and Individual Identity. Aesthetic Synthesis and Collective Experience. Formal Popularization/Political Cooptation -- 6. Postmodern Narrative/Biographical Imperative. Identifying a Postmodernist "Canon" Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Subject. Robert Coover and Metafictional Baseball. Multiplicity and Uncertainty in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Maxine Hong Kingston's Postmodern Life Story. CODA: Categorical Collapse and the Possibility of "Commitment"

1