Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction

In Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction, Daniel Punday examines the "postmodern" expansion of fictionality-the feeling today that the line between the real and the invented is harder to draw-and argues that this feeling reflects a struggle by different cultural groups to define how we tell and use "literary" stories. He discusses the literary texts of John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed; paraliterary forms like science fiction and electronic writing; and resolutely nonliterary texts, especially role-playing games, in terms of how each responds to the institution of literature through its definition of fictionality.

For too long, postmodernism has been described by easy generalizations-relativist, indeterminate, commercialized-that have rendered the term nearly worthless. Punday applies a more nuanced understanding of fictionality to a variety of contemporary narrative forms that occupy different locations within postmodern literary culture. Approaching postmodernism as a configuration of institutions that legitimize fictionality, he illuminates the nature of creative writing and the conflicts between different literary groups in America today.