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185-634: Donald Barthelme Jr. (pronounced BAR-thəl-mee or BAR-təl-mee ; April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction . Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post , was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and

370-461: A "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson , Neal Stephenson , and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Heller's Catch-22 , the sense of paranoia , the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of

555-474: A 1972 New York Times Book Review essay. She writes, "This from a writer of arguable genius whose works reflect what he himself must feel, in book after book, that his brain is all fragments... just like everything else." Perhaps, the most discrete reference to this fragment comes from "See the Moon?" from Unspeakable Practices . The narrator states and repeats the phrase, "Fragments are the only forms I trust." It

740-418: A 1975 interview for Pacifica Radio , Barthelme stresses that, for him, Beckett is foremost among his literary predecessors, saying, "I'm enormously impressed by Beckett. I'm just overwhelmed by Beckett, as Beckett was, I speculate, by Joyce". What follows is a partial list gleaned from the interviews. Barthelme was also quite interested in and influenced by a number of contemporary artists, particularly

925-595: A 1981 article in Rolling Stone magazine calling the stretch of West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues the "sleaziest block in America". By the late 1990s, led by efforts by the city and the Walt Disney Company , the area had been revived as a center of tourism to the point where it was described by The New York Times as "arguably the most sought-after 13 acres of commercial property in

1110-523: A break from the 19th century realism . In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism , turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the " stream of consciousness " styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf , or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot . In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land

1295-688: A center piece of the Latin American "boom" , a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism

1480-412: A certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock,

1665-645: A collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists , the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern". The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of

1850-484: A combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity : for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in

2035-615: A culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR , the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor , and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ... Here's Robert Coover 's 1966 A Public Burning , in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable , in which

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2220-589: A day celebrated as Evacuation Day , marking when the last British forces left the city. From January 11, 1785, until 1789, New York City was the fifth of five capitals of the United States under the Articles of Confederation , with the Continental Congress meeting at New York City Hall (then at Fraunces Tavern ). New York was the first capital under the newly enacted Constitution of

2405-457: A giant, irregular balloon over most of Manhattan , causing widely divergent reactions in the populace. Children play across its top, enjoying it literally on a surface level; adults attempt to read meaning into it but are baffled by its ever-changing shape; the authorities attempt to destroy it but fail. In the final paragraph, the reader learns that the narrator has inflated the balloon for purely personal reasons, and he sees no intrinsic meaning in

2590-563: A growing number of Indian restaurants and spice shops along a stretch of Lexington Avenue between 25th and 30th Streets which has become known as Curry Hill . Washington Heights in Uptown Manhattan is home to the largest Dominican immigrant community in the United States. Harlem , also in Upper Manhattan, is the historical epicenter of African American culture. Since 2010, a Little Australia has emerged and

2775-610: A hundred more short stories, first collected in City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Many of these stories were later reprinted and slightly revised for the collections Sixty Stories (1981), Forty Stories (1987), and posthumously, Flying to America (2007). Though primarily known for these stories, Barthelme also produced four novels: Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), Paradise (1986), and The King (1990, posthumous). Barthelme also wrote

2960-930: A language other than English at home. Points of interest on Manhattan Island include the American Museum of Natural History ; the Battery ; Broadway and the Theater District ; Bryant Park ; Central Park , Chinatown ; the Chrysler Building ; The Cloisters ; Columbia University ; Curry Hill ; the Empire State Building ; Flatiron Building ; the Financial District (including the New York Stock Exchange Building ; Wall Street ; and

3145-515: A multibillion-dollar rebuilding plan was unveiled to restore the historic grandeur of Penn Station, in the process of upgrading the landmark's status as a critical transportation hub . The 700,000 sq ft (65,000 m ) Moynihan Train Hall , developed as a $ 1.6 billion renovation and expansion of Penn Station into the James A. Farley Building , the city's former main post office building,

3330-409: A playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller and Vonnegut address the events of World War II . The central concept of Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic " catch-22 ", and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within

3515-535: A series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights . In

3700-408: A serious context. For example, it contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality :

3885-467: A wildlife sanctuary, and several lawns and sporting areas, as well as 21 playgrounds, and a 6-mile (9.7 km) road from which automobile traffic has been banned since 2018. While much of the park looks natural, it is almost entirely landscaped; the construction of Central Park in the 1850s was one of the era's most massive public works projects, with some 20,000 workers moving 5 million cubic yards (3.8 million cubic meters) of material to shape

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4070-562: A year. In 1961, the struggling Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office building complex. Organized protests were aimed at preserving the McKim, Mead & White -designed structure completed in 1910, widely considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City. Despite these efforts, demolition of

4255-619: Is " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote " by Jorge Luis Borges , a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker 's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream . References to Don Quixote can also be found in Paul Auster 's post-modern detective story, City of Glass . Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism

4440-473: Is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general." The 1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature. Don DeLillo 's White Noise , Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy and this is also the era when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history, charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale , Linda Hutcheon , and Paul Maltby who argues that it

4625-420: Is John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke 's poem of the same name . Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be

4810-598: Is a name from the Dutch colonial era after Haarlem , a city in the Netherlands. Some have simple folkloric names, such as Hell's Kitchen , alongside their more official but lesser used title (in this case, Clinton). Some neighborhoods, such as SoHo , which is mixed use, are known for upscale shopping as well as residential use. Others, such as Greenwich Village , the Lower East Side , Alphabet City and

4995-404: Is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" makes

5180-529: Is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez 's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings "). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was

5365-528: Is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth." In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus , and Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy , which

5550-532: Is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov 's Pale Fire (1962), in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children parallels

5735-401: Is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax structure which complements the illustration of

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5920-671: Is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America. Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov ; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern. Some of

6105-621: Is another described as a "magic realist". Postmodernists such as Italo Calvino ( The Baron in the Trees , 1957), and Salman Rushdie ( The Ground Beneath Her Feet , 1999), commonly use magic realism in their work. A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier 's " The Ceiling ", Dan Chaon 's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel 's "Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver 's "The Mourning Door". Fredric Jameson called postmodernism

6290-762: Is bounded by the Hudson River to the west and the East River to the east. To the north, the Harlem River divides Manhattan Island from the Bronx and the mainland United States. Early in the 19th century, land reclamation was used to expand Lower Manhattan from the natural Hudson shoreline at Greenwich Street to West Street . When building the World Trade Center in 1968, 1.2 million cubic yards (920,000 m ) of material excavated from

6475-446: Is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of

6660-508: Is growing in Nolita, Lower Manhattan. Manhattan has two central business districts, the Financial District at the southern tip of the island, and Midtown Manhattan . The term uptown also refers to the northern part of Manhattan above 72nd Street and downtown to the southern portion below 14th Street , with Midtown covering the area in between, though definitions can be fluid. Fifth Avenue roughly bisects Manhattan Island and acts as

6845-482: Is important, however, to not conflate the quote's sentiment with Barthelme's personal philosophy, as he expressed irritation over the "fragments" quote being attributed so frequently to him rather than his narrator. Another Barthelme device was breaking up a tale with illustrations culled from mostly popular 19th-century publications, collaged, and appended with ironic captions. Barthelme called his cutting up and pasting together pictures "a secret vice gone public". One of

7030-558: Is land and 10.8 square miles (28 km ) (32%) is water. The northern segment of Upper Manhattan represents a geographic panhandle . Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles (59 km ) in area, 13.4 miles (21.6 km) long and 2.3 miles (3.7 km) wide, at its widest point, near 14th Street . The borough consists primarily of Manhattan Island, along with the Marble Hill neighborhood and several small islands, including Randalls Island and Wards Island and Roosevelt Island in

7215-577: Is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida 's " Structure, Sign, and Play " lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan 's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodern works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in

7400-544: Is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover 's Pinocchio in Venice , for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann 's Death in Venice . Also, Umberto Eco 's The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , and Borges . An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists

7585-682: Is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars. Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel 's Impressions d'Afrique  [ fr ] (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico 's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]". Postmodern literature represents

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7770-468: Is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and

7955-415: Is related to mastery." Although Ercolino's "maximalist" examples overlapped with LeClair's earlier systems novel examples, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an ambiguous relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power." Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto , attack

8140-658: Is relatively evenly spread throughout the year. Average winter snowfall between 1981 and 2010 has been 25.8 inches (66 cm); this varies considerably from year to year. Manhattan's many neighborhoods are not named according to any particular convention, nor do they have official boundaries. Some are geographical (the Upper East Side ), or ethnically descriptive ( Little Italy ). Others are acronyms , such as TriBeCa (for "TRIangle BElow CAnal Street") or SoHo ("SOuth of HOuston"), NoLIta ("NOrth of Little ITAly"), and NoMad ("NOrth of MADison Square Park"). Harlem

8325-400: Is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance,

8510-913: Is the world's seventh-tallest building (as of 2023) . The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan began on September 17, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide. On October 29 and 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive destruction in the borough, ravaging portions of Lower Manhattan with record-high storm surge from New York Harbor, severe flooding, and high winds, causing power outages for hundreds of thousands of city residents and leading to gasoline shortages and disruption of mass transit systems. The storm and its profound impacts have prompted discussion of constructing seawalls and other coastal barriers around

8695-471: Is the economic engine of New York City , with its 2.45 million workers drawn from the entire New York metropolitan area accounting for almost more than half of all jobs in New York City. Manhattan's workforce is overwhelmingly focused on white collar professions. In 2010, Manhattan's daytime population was swelling to 3.94 million, with commuters adding a net 1.48 million people to

8880-638: Is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City . Coextensive with New York County , Manhattan is the smallest county by geographical area in the U.S. state of New York . Located almost entirely on Manhattan Island near the southern tip of the state, Manhattan constitutes the center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area . Manhattan serves as New York City's economic and administrative center and has been described as

9065-647: Is the most expensive shopping street in the world. The borough hosts many prominent bridges , tunnels , and skyscrapers including the Empire State Building , Chrysler Building , and One World Trade Center . It is also home to the National Basketball Association 's New York Knicks and the National Hockey League 's New York Rangers . Manhattan was historically part of the Lenapehoking territory inhabited by

9250-548: Is this an exclusive list of features. Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony , along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text ) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though

9435-708: Is well suited for the foundations of Manhattan's skyscrapers . It is part of the Manhattan Prong physiographic region. Under the Köppen climate classification , New York City features both a humid subtropical climate ( Cfa ) and a humid continental climate ( Dfa ); it is the northernmost major city on the North American continent with a humid subtropical climate. The city averages 234 days with at least some sunshine annually. Winters are cold and damp, and prevailing wind patterns that blow offshore temper

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9620-516: The Odyssey of Homer , which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. In The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666 , (2014) Stefano Ercolino characterised maximalism as "an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to Europe and Latin America at

9805-745: The American Revolutionary War . The Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan after the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776. The city, greatly damaged by the Great Fire of New York during the campaign, became the British military and political center of operations in North America for the remainder of the war. British occupation lasted until November 25, 1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan,

9990-788: The Bataan Death March , the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the Holocaust , the bombing of Dresden , the Katyn massacre , the fire-bombing of Tokyo , and Japanese American internment ). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War , the Civil Rights Movement , postcolonialism ( Postcolonial literature ), and the rise of the personal computer ( Cyberpunk and Hypertext fiction ). Some further argue that

10175-534: The Cat in the Hat runs for president. Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in

10360-640: The City College of New York , where he served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974 to 1975. In 1961 he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston ; he published his first short story the same year. His New Yorker publication, "L'Lapse", a parody of Michelangelo Antonioni 's film L'Eclisse ( The Eclipse ), followed in 1963. The magazine would go on to publish much of Barthelme's early output, including such now-famous stories as "Me and Miss Mandible",

10545-564: The East Village , have long been associated with the Bohemian subculture. Chelsea is one of several Manhattan neighborhoods with large gay populations and has become a center of both the international art industry and New York's nightlife. Chinatown has the highest concentration of people of Chinese descent outside of Asia . Koreatown is roughly centered on 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Rose Hill features

10730-908: The FBI as "something of a deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11", was a terrorist attack in which six people were killed when a van bomb filled with explosives was detonated in a parking lot below the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex . On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center were struck by hijacked aircraft and collapsed in the September 11 attacks launched by al-Qaeda terrorists. The collapse caused extensive damage to surrounding buildings and skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, and resulted in

10915-585: The Harlem and Hudson rivers, separated it from the remainder of Manhattan. Before World War I, the section of the original Harlem River channel separating Marble Hill from the Bronx was filled in, and Marble Hill became part of the mainland. After a May 1984 court ruling that Marble Hill was simultaneously part of the Borough of Manhattan (not the Borough of the Bronx) and part of Bronx County (not New York County),

11100-602: The Hearst Tower , the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center , and the Bank of America Tower —the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification. The skyscraper , which has shaped Manhattan's distinctive skyline , has been closely associated with New York City's identity since the end of the 19th century. Structures such as the Equitable Building of 1915, which rises vertically forty stories from

11285-417: The Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon 's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian period in The French Lieutenant's Woman . Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to feature a metafictional, " Janus-headed " outlook in

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11470-422: The Munsee , Lenape , and Wappinger tribes . There were several Lenape settlements in the area including Sapohanikan , Nechtanc , and Konaande Kongh , which were interconnected by a series of trails. The primary trail on the island, which would later become Broadway , ran from what is now Inwood in the north to Battery Park in the south. There were various sites for fishing and planting established by

11655-546: The New York School , the San Francisco Renaissance , and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen ). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group ( John Ashbery , Richard Brautigan , Gilbert Sorrentino , and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with

11840-497: The South Street Seaport ); Grand Central Terminal ; Greenwich Village (including New York University ; Washington Square Arch ; and Stonewall Inn ); Harlem and Spanish Harlem ; the High Line ; Koreatown ; Lincoln Center ; Little Australia ; Little Italy ; Madison Square Garden ; Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art ); Penn Station , Port Authority Bus Terminal ; Rockefeller Center (including Radio City Music Hall ); Times Square ; and

12025-496: The U.S. mainland . Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower Manhattan, Midtown , and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan is one of the most densely populated locations in the world, with a 2020 census population of 1,694,250 living in a land area of 22.66 square miles (58.69 km ), or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km ), and coextensive with New York County, its residential property has

12210-440: The University of Houston , where Barthelme would later study journalism. Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award in Short Story in 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in Houston. (Barthelme also attended St. Thomas Catholic High School in Houston.) In 1951, as a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post . Two years later, Barthelme was drafted into the U.S. Army , arriving in Korea on July 27, 1953,

12395-445: The Vietnam War , features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture

12580-454: The World Trade Center (including the National September 11 Museum and One World Trade Center ). There are also numerous iconic bridges across rivers that connect to Manhattan Island, as well as an emerging number of supertall skyscrapers . The Statue of Liberty rests on Liberty Island , an exclave of Manhattan, and part of Ellis Island is also an exclave of Manhattan. The borough has many energy-efficient office buildings, such as

12765-466: The citadel of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, later called New Amsterdam ( Nieuw Amsterdam ), in what is now Lower Manhattan. The establishment of Fort Amsterdam is recognized as the birth of New York City. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony. New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on February 2, 1653. In 1664, English forces conquered New Netherland and renamed it "New York" after

12950-409: The deaths of 2,606 of the 17,400 who had been in the buildings when the planes hit, in addition to those on the planes. Since 2001, most of Lower Manhattan has been restored, although there has been controversy surrounding the rebuilding. In 2014, the new One World Trade Center , at 1,776 feet (541 m) measured to the top of its spire, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and

13135-404: The postmodern and deconstruction schools. His brothers Frederick (born 1943) and Steven (born 1947) are also respected fiction writers. He married four times. His second wife, Helen Moore Barthelme, later wrote a biography entitled Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound , published in 2001. With his third wife Birgit, a Dane, he had his first child, a daughter named Anne, and near

13320-681: The topography and create the English-style pastoral landscape that Olmsted and Vaux sought. The remaining 70% of Manhattan's parkland includes 204 playgrounds, 251 Greenstreets, 371 basketball courts , and many other amenities. The next-largest park in Manhattan, the Hudson River Park , stretches 4.5 miles (7.2 km) along the Hudson River and comprises 550 acres (220 ha). Other major parks include: Manhattan

13505-527: The world's tallest building . Manhattan's majority white ethnic group declined from 98.7% in 1900 to 58.3% by 1990. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village killed 146 garment workers , leading to overhauls of the city's fire department, building codes , and workplace safety regulations. In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched upon Washington Square Park to commemorate

13690-412: The " found object " collage techniques of Robert Rauschenberg . Postmodern literature Precursors to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote (1605–1615), Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), James Hogg 's Private Memoires and Convessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), and Jack Kerouac 's On

13875-420: The "cultural logic of late capitalism". " Late capitalism " implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and one's understanding of

14060-442: The (2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault and others. The third category is the "cultural postmodernism", which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism. Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced

14245-745: The 1,537,195 counted in the 2000 census . In 2010, the largest organized religious group in Manhattan was the Archdiocese of New York , with 323,325 Catholics worshiping at 109 parishes, followed by 64,000 Orthodox Jews with 77 congregations, an estimated 42,545 Muslims with 21 congregations, 42,502 non-denominational adherents with 54 congregations, 26,178 TEC Episcopalians with 46 congregations, 25,048 ABC-USA Baptists with 41 congregations, 24,536 Reform Jews with 10 congregations, 23,982 Mahayana Buddhists with 35 congregations, 10,503 PC-USA Presbyterians with 30 congregations, and 10,268 RCA Presbyterians with 10 congregations. Altogether, 44.0% of

14430-711: The 1920s, Manhattan experienced large arrivals of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the southern United States, and the Harlem Renaissance , part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that included new skyscrapers competing for the skyline, with the Woolworth Building (1913), 40 Wall Street (1930), Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) leapfrogging each other to take their place as

14615-544: The 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell , Fowles , Carter , Brooke-Rose , Barnes , Ackroyd , and Martin Amis ) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative. Manhattan Manhattan ( / m æ n ˈ h æ t ən , m ə n -/ man- HAT -ən, mən- )

14800-440: The 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City, including Manhattan, to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates. While a resurgence in the financial industry greatly improved the city's economic health in the 1980s, New York's crime rate continued to increase through the decade and into the beginning of the 1990s. The 1980s saw a rebirth of Wall Street , and Manhattan reclaimed its role as

14985-417: The 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows. In April 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano , sailing in service of Francis I of France , became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City. Verrazzano entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named

15170-567: The Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the Midwestern United States and Canada . Tammany Hall , a Democratic Party political machine , began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish , culminating in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood , in 1854. Covering 840 acres (340 ha) in the center of the island, Central Park , which opened its first portions to

15355-643: The Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs . Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction ; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited

15540-571: The East River; and Governors Island and Liberty Island to the south in New York Harbor . The Island is about 13.4 miles (21.6 km) from north to south, and at its widest, 2.3 miles (3.7 km). Manhattan Island is loosely divided into Downtown ( Lower Manhattan ), Midtown ( Midtown Manhattan ), and Uptown ( Upper Manhattan ), with Fifth Avenue dividing Manhattan lengthwise into its East Side and West Side . Manhattan Island

15725-708: The English Duke of York and Albany , the future King James II. In August 1673, the Dutch reconquered the colony, renaming it "New Orange", but permanently relinquished it back to England the following year under the terms of the Treaty of Westminster that ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War . Manhattan was at the heart of the New York Campaign , a series of major battles in the early stages of

15910-536: The Lenape throughout Manhattan. The name Manhattan originated from the Lenape 's language, Munsee , manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means " bow ", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems ). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in

16095-475: The Road (1957), but postmodern literature was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers ' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), and Jennifer Egan 's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). These works also further develop the postmodern form. Sometimes

16280-678: The United Nations is located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan. Manhattan hosts three of the world's top 10 most-visited tourist attractions: Times Square , Central Park , and Grand Central Terminal . Penn Station is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere . Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. Fifth Avenue

16465-719: The United States , from March 4, 1789, to August 12, 1790, at Federal Hall . Federal Hall was where the United States Supreme Court met for the first time, the United States Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified, and where the Northwest Ordinance was adopted, establishing measures for admission to the Union of new states. New York grew as an economic center, first as a result of Alexander Hamilton 's policies and practices as

16650-490: The actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein 's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern. As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died,

16835-473: The aesthetics of postmodernism include August Strindberg , Luigi Pirandello , and Bertolt Brecht . Another precursor to postmodernism was Dadaism , which challenged the authority of the artist and highlighted elements of chance, whim, parody, and irony. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature

17020-436: The artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Woolf's Orlando , for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and

17205-544: The assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania . The family moved to Texas two years later and Barthelme's father became a professor of architecture at

17390-480: The author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with

17575-437: The author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse and especially Samuel Beckett . Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout

17760-413: The balloon itself. Other notable stories from this collection include "The Indian Uprising", a mad collage of a Comanche attack on a modern city, and "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning", a series of vignettes showing the difficulties of truly knowing a public figure. The latter story appeared in print only two months before Robert F. Kennedy 's 1968 assassination . Barthelme would go on to write over

17945-416: The barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work ... He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters. The " Beat Generation "

18130-411: The beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes ' The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 ( Waiting for Godot , 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning

18315-414: The best books of the year and described the collection as written with "Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor". His formal originality can be seen in his fresh handling of the parodic dramatic monologue in "The School" or a list of one hundred numbered sentences and fragments in "The Glass Mountain". Joyce Carol Oates commented on this sense of fragmentation in "Whose Side Are You On?",

18500-398: The book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin , for the creation of the " cut-up " technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded . Magic realism

18685-454: The broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In Robert Coover 's 1977 novel The Public Burning , Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker . Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson 's 1969 novel The Unfortunates ; it

18870-534: The city became a hotbed of revolution (including anarchists and communists among others), syndicalism , racketeering , and unionization . In 1883, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River established a road connection to Brooklyn and the rest of Long Island . In 1898, New York City consolidated with three neighboring counties to form "the City of Greater New York ", and Manhattan

19055-578: The city's skyline, most notably the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and 30 Rockefeller Plaza . A postwar economic boom led to the development of huge housing developments targeted at returning veterans, the largest being Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village , which opened in 1947. The United Nations relocated to a new headquarters that was completed in 1952 along the East River. The Stonewall riots were

19240-1054: The coldest winter month. Spring and autumn are unpredictable and can range from chilly to warm, although they are usually mild with low humidity. Summers are typically warm to hot and humid, with a daily mean temperature of 76.5 °F (24.7 °C) in July. Nighttime conditions are often exacerbated by the urban heat island phenomenon, which causes heat absorbed during the day to be radiated back at night, raising temperatures by as much as 7 °F (4 °C) when winds are slow. Daytime temperatures exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on average of 17 days each summer and in some years exceed 100 °F (38 °C). Extreme temperatures have ranged from −15 °F (−26 °C), recorded on February 9, 1934, up to 106 °F (41 °C) on July 9, 1936. Manhattan lies in USDA plant hardiness zone 7b (5 to 10 °F/-15 to -12.2 °C). Manhattan receives 49.9 inches (1,270 mm) of precipitation annually, which

19425-416: The collapse of the American empire. Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude . Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of

19610-493: The connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature: It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as

19795-443: The creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt , describes a week in the life of a poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves remarkably prophetic. In The Comforters , Muriel Spark 's protagonist hears the sound of a typewriter and voices that later may transform into the novel itself. Jan Křesadlo purports to be merely

19980-458: The cultural, financial, media , and entertainment capital of the world. Present-day Manhattan was originally part of Lenape territory. European settlement began with the establishment of a trading post by Dutch colonists in 1624 on southern Manhattan Island; the post was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted

20165-803: The day of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement , which ended the Korean War . Assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division , he served briefly as the editor of an Army newspaper and the Public Information Office of the Eighth Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post . Once back, he continued his studies at the University of Houston studying philosophy. While at

20350-472: The decade to 1,694,250, representing 19.2% of New York City's population of 8,804,194 and 8.4% of New York State's population of 20,201,230. The population density of New York County was 70,450.8 inhabitants per square mile (27,201.2/km ) in 2022, the highest population density of any county in the United States and higher than the density of any individual U.S. city . At the 2010 census , there were 1,585,873 people living in Manhattan, an increase of 3.2% from

20535-407: The demarcation line for east/west designations. South of Waverly Place , Fifth Avenue terminates and Broadway becomes the east/west demarcation line. In Manhattan, uptown means north and downtown means south. This usage differs from that of most American cities, where downtown refers to the central business district. As of the 2020 census , Manhattan's population had increased by 6.8% over

20720-498: The description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte 's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault . Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges , an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He

20905-536: The earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William Gaddis ' The Recognitions (1955), Vladimir Nabokov 's Lolita (1955), and William Burroughs ' Naked Lunch (1959). It then rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 in 1961, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and many others. Thomas Pynchon 's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow

21090-414: The end of his life, he married Marion Knox Barthelme, with whom he had his second daughter, Katharine. Marion and Donald remained married until his death in 1989. Marion died in 2011. Barthelme died of throat cancer in 1989. Barthelme's fiction was hailed by some for being profoundly disciplined and derided by others as being meaningless, academic postmodernism. Barthelme's thoughts and work were largely

21275-463: The entire work. In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit , a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos , one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature, an almost telegraphic style

21460-534: The exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says: Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness;

21645-438: The fiction pages of The New Yorker , herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism. Many of these authors emphasize a strong urge for sincerity in literature. Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor

21830-511: The fire. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those manufactured by the company, a clothing style that became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of women's liberation , reflecting the alliance of the labor and suffrage movements. Despite the Great Depression , some of the world's tallest skyscrapers were completed in Manhattan during the 1930s, including numerous Art Deco masterpieces that are still part of

22015-610: The first Secretary of the Treasury to expand the city's role as a center of commerce and industry. By 1810, New York City, then confined to Manhattan, had surpassed Philadelphia as the most populous city in the United States. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid out the island of Manhattan in its familiar grid plan . The city's role as an economic center grew with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, cutting transportation costs by 90% compared to road transport and connecting

22200-540: The first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien 's 1990 short story cycle The Things They Carried , about one platoon's experiences during

22385-535: The first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett 's Texts for Nothing ... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and "contentism", pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction... Many of

22570-464: The form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22 , J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man , Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road , Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Thomas Pynchon

22755-403: The future of fiction?", Sam Leith compared Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation with Dave Eggers' The Every . Leith wrote, "The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that responds to old-fashioned novels hasn't changed as fast as

22940-491: The highest sale price per square foot in the United States. Manhattan is home to Wall Street as well as the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization , the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq . Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, as are numerous colleges and universities, such as Columbia University and New York University . The headquarters of

23125-470: The horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges , author of Historia universal de la infamia (1935) is considered a bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude . The Cuban Alejo Carpentier ( The Kingdom of This World , 1949)

23310-443: The idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth , Joseph Heller , William Gaddis , Kurt Vonnegut , Bruce Jay Friedman , etc. It is common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in

23495-432: The idea of parody itself. Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino 's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique:

23680-653: The investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half-century ago." Another critic, Jacob M. Appel , described him as "the most influential unread author in United States history". The great bulk of his work was published in The New Yorker (where fiction editor Roger Angell was his champion). In 1964, he began to publish short stories collections beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari in 1964, followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) and City Life (1970). Time magazine named City Life one of

23865-532: The label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called " The Literature of Exhaustion " and in 1980 published "The Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "The Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "The Literature of Replenishment" Barth says: My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has

24050-473: The land around Upper New York Harbor New Angoulême , in reference to the family name of King Francis I; he sailed far enough into the harbor to sight the Hudson River , and he named the Bay of Santa Margarita – what is now Upper New York Bay – after Marguerite de Navarre , the elder sister of the king. Manhattan was first mapped during a 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson . Hudson came across Manhattan Island and

24235-499: The lands to his brother, the Duke of York . New York, based in present-day Lower Manhattan , served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor greeted millions of arriving immigrants in the late 19th century and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals. Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898 , and houses New York City Hall ,

24420-546: The literary theorist Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel. The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention , through the rape of Nanjing ,

24605-503: The main character on Barthelme. In a 1971–1972 interview with Jerome Klinkowitz (now collected in Not-Knowing ), Barthelme provides a list of favorite writers, both influential figures from the past and contemporary writers he admired. Throughout other interviews in the same collection, Barthelme reiterates a number of the same names and also mentions several others, occasionally expanding on why these writers were important for him. In

24790-414: The main character's subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly chaotic world. Patricia Lockwood 's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process. John Barth , a postmodernist novelist who talks often about

24975-563: The matter was definitively settled later that year when the New York Legislature overwhelmingly passed legislation declaring the neighborhood part of both New York County and the Borough of Manhattan. Within New York Harbor , there are three smaller islands: Other smaller islands, in the East River , include (from north to south): The bedrock underlying much of Manhattan consists of three rock formations: Inwood marble , Fordham gneiss , and Manhattan schist , and

25160-402: The maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment. In a 2022 GQ article, "Is the 'systems novel'

25345-636: The moderating effects of the Atlantic Ocean , yet the Atlantic and the partial shielding from colder air by the Appalachians keep the city warmer in the winter than inland North American cities at similar or lesser latitudes. The daily mean temperature in January, the area's coldest month, is 32.6 °F (0.3 °C); temperatures usually drop to 10 °F (−12 °C) several times per winter, and reach 60 °F (16 °C) several days in

25530-489: The modernists' belief in the power of art to reconstruct society, leading most critics to class him as a postmodernist writer. Literary critics have noted that Barthelme, like Stéphane Mallarmé , whom he admired, plays with the meanings of words, relying on poetic intuition to spark new connections of ideas buried in the expressions and conventional responses. The critic George Wicks called Barthelme "the leading American practitioner of surrealism today... whose fiction continues

25715-542: The narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction . By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators . Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Salman Rushdie 's Haroun and the Sea of Stories . Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek : ποιούμενον , "product")

25900-473: The native people living there, and continued up the river that would later bear his name, the Hudson River . Manhattan was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata , in the logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on the voyage. A permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624, with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island . In 1625, construction was started on

26085-452: The non-fiction book Guilty Pleasures (1974). His other writings have been posthumously gathered into two collections, The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992) and Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1997). With his daughter, he wrote the children's book The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine , which received the 1972 National Book Award in category Children's Books . He

26270-581: The novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon: [P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen , a way of operating. ... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland . Still there

26455-466: The original World Trade Center , which was destroyed during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks . Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors , the borough is bounded by the Hudson , East , and Harlem rivers and includes several small adjacent islands , including Roosevelt , U Thant , and Randalls and Wards Islands . It also includes the small neighborhood of Marble Hill now on

26640-603: The pieces in the collection Guilty Pleasures , "The Expedition", featured a full-page illustration of a collision between ships, with the caption "Not our fault!" Barthelme's legacy as an educator lives on at the University of Houston , where he was one of the founders of the prestigious Creative Writing Program. At the University of Houston, Barthelme became known as a sensitive, creative, and encouraging mentor to young creative writing students even as he continued his own writings. Thomas Cobb , one of his students, published his doctoral dissertation Crazy Heart in 1987 partly basing

26825-848: The population was claimed as members by religious congregations, although members of historically African-American denominations were underrepresented due to incomplete information. In 2014, Manhattan had 703 religious organizations, the seventeenth most out of all US counties. There is a large Buddhist temple in Manhattan located at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown . As of 2015, 60.0% (927,650) of Manhattan residents, aged five and older, spoke only English at home, while 22.63% (350,112) spoke Spanish, 5.37% (83,013) Chinese, 2.21% (34,246) French, 0.85% (13,138) Korean, 0.72% (11,135) Russian, and 0.70% (10,766) Japanese. In total, 40.0% of Manhattan's population, aged five and older, spoke

27010-826: The postmodern aesthetic. The work of Alfred Jarry , the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud , Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd . The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus 's concept of the absurd . The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco

27195-498: The postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd , the Beat Generation , and magic realism ) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures ( Samuel Beckett , William S. Burroughs , Jorge Luis Borges , Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez ) are cited as significant contributors to

27380-544: The public in 1858, became the first landscaped public park in an American city. New York City played a complex role in the American Civil War . The city had strong commercial ties to the South , but anger around conscription , resentment against Lincoln's war policies and paranoia about free Blacks taking the jobs of poor immigrants culminated in the three-day-long New York Draft Riots of July 1863, among

27565-488: The real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, the virtual reality of "empathy boxes" in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a new technology-based religion called Mercerism arises. Another example is Don DeLillo 's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with

27750-458: The related term systems novel , the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and

27935-534: The relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work , an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales—as in works by Margaret Atwood , Donald Barthelme , and many others—or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. Often intertextuality

28120-590: The reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ... Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down

28305-710: The result of 20th-century angst as he read extensively, for example in Pascal , Husserl , Heidegger , Kierkegaard , Ionesco , Beckett , Sartre , and Camus . Barthelme's stories typically avoid traditional plot structures, relying instead on a steady accumulation of seemingly unrelated detail. By subverting the reader's expectations through constant non-sequiturs , Barthelme creates a fragmented verbal collage reminiscent of such modernist works as T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land and James Joyce 's Ulysses , whose linguistic experiments he often challenged. However, Barthelme's fundamental skepticism and irony distanced him from

28490-693: The sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above ) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut 's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada , Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover 's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants ,

28675-596: The seat of the city's government . Harlem in Upper Manhattan became the center of what is now known as the cultural Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village , part of the Stonewall National Monument , is considered the birthplace in 1969 of the modern gay rights movement , cementing Manhattan's central role in LGBT culture . Manhattan was the site of

28860-399: The self's mastery of itself, economic and political hegemony, force in history and culture, the transforming power of science and technology, the control of information and art. These novels are also about the size and scale of contemporary experience: how multiplicity and magnitude create new relations and new proportions among persons and entities, how quantity affects quality, how massiveness

29045-589: The shorelines of the borough and the metropolitan area to minimize the risk of destructive consequences from another such event in the future. On October 31, 2017 , a terrorist drove a truck down a bike path alongside the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, killing eight. According to the United States Census Bureau , New York County has a total area of 33.6 square miles (87 km ), of which 22.8 square miles (59 km )

29230-551: The short story form. His style—fictional and popular figures in absurd situations, e.g., the Batman -inspired "The Joker's Greatest Triumph"—spawned a number of imitators and would help to define the next several decades of short fiction. Barthelme continued his success in the short story form with Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). One widely anthologized story from this collection, "The Balloon", appears to reflect on Barthelme's intentions as an artist. The narrator inflates

29415-432: The sidewalk, prompted the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution , requiring new buildings to contain setbacks withdrawing progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve a view of the sky at street level. Manhattan's skyline includes several buildings that are symbolic of New York, in particular the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building , which sees about 4 million visitors

29600-548: The site was used to expand the Manhattan shoreline across West Street, creating Battery Park City . Constructed on piers at a cost of $ 260 million, Little Island opened on the Hudson River in May 2021, connected to the western termini of 13th and 14th Streets by footbridges . Marble Hill was part of the northern tip of Manhattan Island, but the Harlem River Ship Canal , dug in 1895 to better connect

29785-642: The structure began in October 1963. The loss of Penn Station led directly to the enactment in 1965 of a local law establishing the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission , which is responsible for preserving the "city's historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage ". The historic preservation movement triggered by Penn Station's demise has been credited with the retention of some one million structures nationwide, including over 1,000 in New York City. In 2017,

29970-563: The tale of a 35-year-old sent to elementary school by either a clerical error, failing at his job as an insurance adjuster, or failing in his marriage. Written in October 1960, it was the first of his stories to be published. "A Shower of Gold", another early short story, portrays a sculptor who agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? . In 1964, Barthelme collected his early stories in Come Back, Dr. Caligari , for which he received considerable critical acclaim as an innovator of

30155-638: The term " historiographic metafiction " to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar ), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert ), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini , Henry Ford , Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria , Booker T. Washington , Sigmund Freud , and Carl Jung ), and Rabih Alameddine 's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to

30340-408: The term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture to historical theory to philosophy and film . Because of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: (1) Postmodernity is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present, which is different from

30525-781: The term in relation to Don DeLillo , Tom LeClair chose seven novels as the focus of The Art of Excess . They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon ), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller ), J R (by William Gaddis ), The Public Burning (by Robert Coover ), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy ), LETTERS (by John Barth ) and Always Coming Home (by Ursula Le Guin ). LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect." LeClair wrote, "These seven novels are about mastery, about excesses of power, force, and authority in arenas small and large:

30710-473: The theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut , the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. This theme is likewise present in the satirical dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game Paranoia . Dubbed maximalism by some critics, and overlapping with

30895-719: The threshold the twenty-first." . Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow , Infinite Jest , Underworld , White Teeth , The Corrections , 2666 , and 2005 dopo Cristo by Babette Factory. Tom LeClair had previously coined the term systems novel in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel , exploring the concept further in his 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction . Having introduced

31080-518: The translator of a "chrononaut's" handed down Homeric Greek science fiction epic, the Astronautilia . Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett 's trilogy ( Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable ); Doris Lessing 's The Golden Notebook ; John Fowles 's Mantissa ; William Golding 's The Paper Men ; Gilbert Sorrentino 's Mulligan Stew ; and S. D. Chrostowska 's Permission . Linda Hutcheon coined

31265-400: The truth. David Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is non-fiction. He employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace. Giannina Braschi also has a namesake character and uses metafiction and pastiche in her novels Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana about

31450-565: The university, he started up a literary journal called Forum , which published many future "big names", including Norman Mailer , Walker Percy , Marshall McLuhan , and William H. Gass . Although Barthelme continued to take classes until 1957, he never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in Houston's Black jazz clubs, listening to musical innovators such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelley , an experience that influenced his later writing. Barthelme went on to teach for brief periods at Boston University , University at Buffalo , and

31635-421: The way the novel seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that. Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for

31820-495: The well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II , one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 . Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war: The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War , the cold war of the 1950s. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that

32005-574: The world around it." Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism , is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail,

32190-399: The world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 , long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke". This often coincides with

32375-423: The world's financial center , with Wall Street employment doubling from 1977 to 1987. The 1980s also saw Manhattan at the heart of the AIDS crisis , with Greenwich Village at its epicenter. In the 1970s, Times Square and 42nd Street – with its sex shops , peep shows , and adult theaters, along with its sex trade , street crime, and public drug use – became emblematic of the city's decline, with

32560-470: The world." By the 1990s, crime rates began to drop dramatically and the city once again became the destination of immigrants from around the world, joining with low interest rates and Wall Street bonus payments to fuel the growth of the real estate market. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley , emerged in the Flatiron District , cementing technology as a key component of Manhattan's economy. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing , described by

32745-427: The worst incidents of civil disorder in American history. The rate of immigration from Europe grew steeply after the Civil War, and Manhattan became the first stop for millions seeking a new life in the United States, a role acknowledged by the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. This immigration brought further social upheaval. In a city of tenements packed with poorly paid laborers from dozens of nations,

32930-462: Was also a director of PEN , the Authors Guild , and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters . Barthelme's relationship with his father was a struggle between a rebellious son and a demanding father. In later years they would have tremendous arguments about the kinds of literature in which Barthelme was interested and which he wrote. While in many ways his father was avant-garde in art and aesthetics , he did not approve of

33115-438: Was established as one of the five boroughs of New York City . The Bronx remained part of New York County until 1914, when Bronx County was established. The construction of the New York City Subway , which opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together, as did the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge (1903) and Manhattan Bridge (1909) connecting to Brooklyn and the Queensboro Bridge (1909) connecting to Queens. In

33300-417: Was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst , for example). Artists associated with Surrealism , which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton , the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and

33485-400: Was not until the 1980s that the term "postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing. A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace , William T. Vollmann , Dave Eggers , Michael Chabon , Zadie Smith , Chuck Palahniuk , Jennifer Egan , Neil Gaiman , Carole Maso , Richard Powers , Jonathan Lethem —and publications such as McSweeney's , The Believer , and

33670-439: Was opened in January 2021. Parkland covers a total of 2,659 acres (10.76 km ), accounting for 18.2% of the borough's land area; the 840-acre (3.4 km ) Central Park is the borough's largest park, comprising 31.6% of Manhattan's parkland. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux , the park is anchored by the 12-acre (4.9 ha) Great Lawn and offers extensive walking tracks , two ice-skating rinks,

33855-492: Was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose. Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", as is typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of disbelief". For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody

34040-420: Was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac , who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust 's In Search of Lost Time . More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets ,

34225-401: Was writing V. , and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle . I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat's Cradle . In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose ' ,

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