Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Gass, William H. - Reginald Dyck (essay date Fall 1991)

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page
4. Tweet This

Reginald Dyck (essay date Fall 1991)

SOURCE: “William Gass: A ‘Purified Modernist’ in a Postmodern World,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 124-30.

[In the following essay, Dyck examines underlying modernist aspects of Gass's postmodern literary and theoretical perspective, including comparative analysis of Gass's story “Icicles” and Wright Morris's novel Ceremony in Lone Tree. “Although modernist in its formal aesthetics,” Dyck writes, “Gass's world of words reflects a postmodern perspective on contemporary culture.”]

I don't regard myself as a postmodernist. … I prefer to think of myself as a purified modernist. In architecture that would mean modernism without social content: Corbusier not building for society.

—William Gass¹

When William Gass claims, “I think that literature is not a form of...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Richard J. Schneider (review date Winter 1979-1980)
   2. Charles Caramello (essay date 1983)
   3. Charlotte Byrd Hadella (essay date Fall 1988)
   4. Kevin J. H. Dettmar (essay date Fall 1991)
   5. Reginald Dyck (essay date Fall 1991)
   6. Arthur M. Saltzman (essay date Fall 1991)
   7. Philip Stevick (essay date Fall 1991)
   8. Robert Kelly (review date 26 February 1995)
   9. Merle Rubin (review date 6 March 1995)
   10. Michael Dirda (review date 12 March 1995)
   11. Michael Silverblatt (review date 19 March 1995)
   12. John Leonard (review date 20 March 1995)
   13. Steven Moore (review date Spring 1995)
   14. Gary Percesepe (review date Summer 1995)
   15. Louis Menand (review date 13 July 1995)
   16. Jim Lewis (review date February 1997)
   17. Maureen Howard (review date 9 March 1997)
   18. John O'Brien (review date Spring 1997)
   19. Marcus Klein (essay date Summer 1997)
   20. Kenneth Haynes (review date Fall 1997)
   21. Arthur Saltzman (review date Fall 1998)
   22. James Wood (review date 1 November 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright