World-Games: The Tradition of Anti-Realist Revolt

Contemporary readers face a literature that seems to ‘speak for’ them, yet they often struggle to say just how or why. Out of the deluge of works from such writers as Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Borges, Brooke-Rose, Burroughs, Butor, Calvino, Cortázar, Federman, Fuentes, Le Guin, Márquez, McElroy, Nabokov, O’Brien, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Sanguineti, Sarraute, Sollers, Sukenick, Tolkien, Vonnegut, new words and world-models that demand understanding fill the air. Yet they seem frequently bey...