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This site began as a project by students in Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Contemporary Fiction course at Pomona College, and will expand with time. We hope that it will prove a valuable resource for students, teachers, and anyone interested in postmodern culture. The original class explored two dominant themes in the development of the novel over the last thirty years: conspiracy and atomization, on the one hand, and the search for (and even the successful development of) community on the other. The course primarily, though not exclusively, focused on the American novel, both those texts considered “canonical,” as well as those from emergent voices. Over the course of the semester, we discussed the cultural climate of the late twentieth century, the meaning or lack thereof of the “postmodern,” and the present status of those bastions of the humanities (the novel, the author, the individual) that seem so endangered in the age of the computer. However, we called that technological threat into question by using computer technologies to facilitate our exploration. Following the theories elaborated by George Landow in Hypertext 2.0, we used hypertext as a means of modeling the kind of intertextual reading that the postmodern novel demands. Assistance in implementing the necessary technology and training students was facilitated by a grant administered through the Humanities Electronic Media Project at Claremont Graduate University.
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