Our response to things in life is determined in great measure by our expectations. Knowing whether our dinner is supposed to be a West Texas taco or a Beijing spring roll will get us off to a good start in deciding if our meal is good Texmex fare or passable Chinese. Having served up one profundity to hungry minds, let me turn to the matter at hand. Is Tom Wolfe's “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” a taco or Chinese roll? Is it journalism or literary criticism (or even some crossgeneric mutation)? Our response to this question determines in large measure, I think, how we will greet the views he advances in the essay, whether with enthusiasm, or without it? And precisely what expectations do we bring to the perusal of yet another essay by one of America's most celebrated contemporary journalists? Do we expect a quick, assured (new) journalistic glance at several grand themes drawn from literary history, past and present, a collection of easily apprehended, if perhaps disconnected, wry observations? Or, do we expect something more rigorous, something along the lines of serious literary criticism with all of the genre's attendant obligations, conventions like defining one's terms, covering one's field of inquiry, and, optimally, self-critique.

Since Tom Wolfe calls himself a journalist, indefatigably, maybe I should take his word for it. Perhaps “Stalking” is journalism and one should leave it at that, accepting it as a different kind of essay than that which finds its way into those journals that like to refer to themselves (often accurately) as “learned.” I, however, will not treat “Stalking” as a mere opinion-piece, as just another entertaining journalistic provocation in a career of such provocations. There are two reasons for this ill-natured response. First, I am a literature professor and find it difficult to be much of anything else. (A lot of quite disparate prose ends up looking like literary criticism to me.) Second, I think in Tom Wolfe's heart of hearts, in what we might call (after Fitzgerald) the three-o'clock-in-the-morning of his journalistic soul, he wants to be taken seriously as a literary critic. Who knows, maybe being a literary critic nudges upward ever so minutely the journalist's “status”—that most Wolfian of terms, indeed (I suspect) that most Wolfian of virtues.

Anyway, lit. crit. it is, and I begin the way so much lit. crit. does by asserting that my absent interlocutor's understanding of literature is less than faultless, and that this essay will count the ways. Or, more to the point, and less succinctly, let me state quite simply that although Tom Wolfe may know a lot of things, and in particular a lot of things about the “American scene”—did he coin that or was that Henry James?—“Stalking” suggests his knowledge of American fiction, past and present, is a tad parochial. So, having immediately ingratiated myself with Mr. Wolfe and those who respect his literary judgments, let me enumerate the aforementioned ways.

Published two years after the appearance of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” serves, narrowly, as an apology for Wolfe's novel and, more broadly, in the words of the essay's subtitle, as “a literary manifesto for the new social novel.” Promotion of a particular canon is of course the very essence of literary criticism and entirely appropriate, even when promotion is inseparable from self-promotion as it is not only in Wolfe's essay but in others published by Harper's and Atlantic over the years by, for example, John Barth—otherwise identified as the “enemy” by Wolfe in “Stalking”—(although, it must be said, Barth's notion of self-promotion has less in common with Madison Avenue's than does Wolfe's). Now there is nothing wrong in principle with manifestoes and self-promotion. These are the ways of the world in the rancorous and commercial late twentieth century. Problems develop however with manifestoes and advertisements—to give self-promotion its colloquial name—when they advance their tendentious claims through a strategy of reductions and tactical evasions. I believe this to be the case with Wolfe's manifesto and indeed its greatest weakness. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe seeks not merely to promote his own views of the novelistic canon but, as manifestoes usually do, to denigrate a counter-tradition, in this case postmodern fiction, that appears to him to be impoverished both in its mimetic efficacy and in its capacity to elicit from the reader a visceral response.

The opening section of “Stalking” is one of the most interesting in the essay. A piece of genetic criticism, it discusses both Wolfe's early New Journalism of the 60s and 70s and his growing infatuation with the idea of writing a big fat novel about big fat New York City. Wolfe has of course tilled these fields before in interviews and essays—notably in “The New Journalism”—but his account is still fascinating. Tom Wolfe is a major contemporary American writer and what he says about his own development and, more generally, contemporary letters commands our attention. He has helped pioneer in the United States one of the more interesting literary developments of the post-war period. New Journalism demonstrates the richness of narrative prose in inventive ways. Wolfe goes wrong, however, when he subsequently indicts his novelist-peers for having not followed the strictures of “realism” in their own work, for not having written his kind of new (i.e., old) social novel. (And I will return presently to Wolfe's troubled notion of realism.)

Regrettably, both in “Stalking” and elsewhere, Wolfe fails to see the fundamental continuity that exists between highly subjective forms of journalism and highly subjective forms of fiction, each of which seeks through narrative a renegotiation of those Urpolarities in human experience, subjectivity and objectivity.¹ Authorial subjectivity is a major preoccupation not only of New Journalism but indeed of American literature in recent decades. Formal reflexivity is one manifestation of this newfound subjectivity and we can cite works by, among many others, Barthelme, Pynchon, and Raymond Federman, not to mention Sukenick and Coover who come in for unkind words in “Stalking.” Another important experimental form is what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafictions.” Such works deal with real historical figures and real historical events but in a far more playful, self-conscious way than, for example, we find in the traditional historical romance as developed by Walter Scott (and imitated to this day by legions) and the documentary or “nonfiction” novel. Examples of historiographic metafictions include of course novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Coover's magnificent The Public Burning, Doctorow's Ragtime, and DeLillo's recent and quite intriguing Libra. This interest in self-consciousness, in authorial self-accountability, has clearly not been confined to American literature. In German fiction, what we have come to know as the “neue Subjektivität” has been an important orientation since the 60s as fictions by Peter Handke and Helmut Heissenbüttel document. At the same time, Latin magical realism brings authorial subjectivity to bear on the interpretation of local history and local mythology.

New Journalism, we might say, is intent on mining the same motherlode of subject matter—call it contemporary reality—as most fiction of the last thirty years. Further, I think, it is even using the same device, a heightened awareness of authorial subjectivity and hence authorial sovereignty. What is fundamentally different of course is that New Journalists initiate their explorations from a different place than do metafictionists or authors of fictional historiography or magical realists, and of course the ore they extract has a different shape and luster. In suggesting the superiority of New Journalism and, even more questionably, the bankruptcy of other experimental narrative forms, Wolfe becomes nothing more than a claimjumper though, ironically, there is a surplus of finds to be made by both the experimental journalist and the experimental novelist.

Now I do not think that Wolfe's views on postmodern American fiction have always been indefensible, even if I hasten to admit never having shared them.² Let me cite two brief quotes from Wolfe to illustrate my point.

The novel is not dead. It's only the novelists who are strangling themselves on what is now a very orthodox, conventional aesthetics based on form. And there are no novelists today who are considered “talented” who would want to do what Balzac did, or what Thackeray or Dickens did … There's so much terra incognita that novelists should be getting into that they could easily be wholly concerned with social fabric, the social tableau. Forget the ersatz psychology that they get into.

(Scura, 39)

Philip Roth was absolutely correct. The imagination of the novelist is powerless before what he knows he's going to read in tomorrow morning's newspaper. But a generation of American writers has drawn precisely the wrong conclusion from that perfectly valid observation. The answer is not to leave the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us, to the journalists but to do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms.

(“Stalking,” 55)

The quotes advance virtually identical views. Both criticize the purported inclination of contemporary writers to flee the social for the personal and esoteric, and both promote for fiction the kind of detailed description of contemporary history one finds in nineteenth century realism and some American modernism. However, in my view, the judgments of the first citation are correct, arguably, while those of the second are manifestly wrong. I'll explain.

The paradox here disappears when we learn that the first statement was made in 1974 in an important interview with Joe David Bellamy while the second appears at the end of “Stalking,” published of course in late 1989. The 60s and early 70s did indeed witness the rise of a metafictional sensibility that did not take as its first priority an unfiltered depiction of American social history although one can argue, as I have elsewhere, that few metafictions are entirely devoid of covert social content. In many cases, it was left up to the reader to relate allegorical claims to their contemporary socio-historical context. This was true of works like “Lost in the Funhouse,” The Universal Baseball Association, and The Crying of Lot 49. This phenomenon of course changed the way readers read, making them far more active than had been formerly required by traditional realistic fiction, but that's another story. In any event, I certainly agree, and have noted elsewhere, that there was a kind of innovation hysteria during the early postmodern period that led to a lot of silliness where, for example, novels were written on cash register tapes or interchangeable cards, where writers bludgeoned their readers with the club of narrative reflexivity: “Look Mom, I'm writin’ a novel” (Contingent Meanings, 39–40). Further, given that metafictionality was best explored in the shorter prose forms, rather than in the novel, many postmodern works were not well-suited for the kind of expansive social depictions constructed by the residents of Wolfe's literary pantheon, the great nineteenth century realists and selected American modernists. To be fair, from the vantage point of the early 70s, Wolfe's position is justifiable even if it does not offer a very differentiated view of the fiction of the period.

However, two things happened to address this preoccupation with novelty, and hence to deflate Wolfe's thesis. The important metafictionists of the period, indeed those authors who have emerged as major writers of the postmodern period—Coover, Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon—did not develop creative arteriosclerois but continued to explore their medium and either attenuated their experimental program or developed a complementary orientation that was more obviously world-referential. Indeed, those writers who did not adjust—is “mature” the word?—have found that their critical reputations have suffered. And I would cite Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman as members of the latter constituency. Indeed, though Wolfe refers to Sukenick's fiction as much praised, his work has not inspired a single book-length study to date, nor has Federman's while Barth et al. have been studied at monographic length.

We should bear in mind, and Wolfe does not, that many of the metafictionists proved themselves capable of powerful social satire—for example, Coover's The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning, Sorrentino's Crystal Vision and Blue Pastoral, and the bulk of Vonnegut's and Pynchon's works—and, further, that the period is marked by the emergence of major black and women writers, some of whom like Ishmael Reed and John Edgar Wideman have adapted postmodern innovations while others such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have remained more traditional. All of these have become major American writers of the late twentieth century. The claims that Wolfe makes in the 1974 Bellamy interview and elsewhere are simply insupportable in the late 80s. To advance them in 1989 is less a diagnosis of contemporary literature than it is of self-preoccupation. The overview of post-war American fiction that Wolfe elaborates in “Stalking” is far too simplistic and fails to contend thoughtfully with nearly a half-century of fiction unprecedented in both formal diversity and thematic richness, a tradition to which Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities to be sure, makes an interesting contribution. It is startling that “Stalking” does not pay tribute to a single postmodern writer, except of course Wolfe himself. It does not mention a single contemporary woman writer, not one. Nor does the essay mention a single writer of color, not one. Nor does it cite a single ethnic writer or regional writer, not one, except of course Wolfe's ongoing references to himself, that earnest chronicler of the Big Apple. Perhaps Wolfe's aesthetic bonfires are stoked less by critical acumen than simple vanity. At one point in the essay, Wolfe laments Barth's Chimera winning of the 1972 National Book Award for fiction, implying the event signals the hijacking of American fiction in the 70s by the experimentalists. Regrettably, Wolfe fails to survey who else has won major fiction awards over the last fifteen or twenty years. The list is as richly diverse as the period's fiction itself.³

Now Tom Wolfe has successfully pulled off this sort of thumbnail critical sketch before—of modern painting in The Painted Word and of architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House—but in each case the object of his obloquy was dealt with far more patiently than he ever has contemporary fiction. There probably is an art historian or two who feel much the same way about The Painted Word as I do about “Stalking.” I happen to think the book is brilliant in its unmasking of the absurd pretensions of post-war American art. Its interpretation is obviously reductive but reduction is the essence of satire. Through caricature, through parodic inflation, through his trademark neologisms, through his deft movement between verbal registers, Wolfe ridicules the motley of -isms that the Art World has frenetically consumed in the post-war period. But “Stalking” does not share the success of The Painted Word (nor for that matter even the more limited achievement of From Bauhaus to Our House). The reasons are fairly obvious. Wolfe's discussion of painting is up-to-date. He did what he and his fellow journalists call the “legwork” or “digging,” what lit. professors call familiarizing oneself with the material and others, less pretentiously, “checkin’ the stuff out.” He read, he researched, he conquered. In The Painted Word his winsome colloquial style betrays no sense of self-importance, none of the “high seriousness” he mocks in others. And, let me note in passing, that the National Gallery of Canada spent—read squandered—the lion's share of its mouse-size 1990 acquisitions budget on a giant striped canvas by Barnett Newman, one of those old minimalist ruses that Wolfe has so much fun with; clearly the art world still takes its high seriousness very seriously. But back to Wolfe.

It is precisely this same kind of high seriousness that he falls prey to in “Stalking.” In the essay, he identifies the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities as the would-be and perhaps even the actual savior of American narrative literature in the late twentieth century. Clearly Tom Wolfe needs to lighten up a bit. (Lighten up, Tom!) Take for example the heaviness, not to mention the presumption, with which he plays his Zola Card at the end of “Stalking.”

At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade of Zolas to head out into this bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.

(“Stalking,” 55)

Now Zola, to digress briefly, is of course a special kind of literary saint. Not only does he both theorize and develop a modestly innovative literary form—the naturalistic novel—but he is also a great champion of human rights and, therein, of social justice. (That he died under circumstances some believe suspicious—of carbon monoxide asphyxiation in his Paris home—strengthens his hagiographers’ position generally, and the martyr thesis in particular.) Consequently, Zola made a mark not only on the literature of his epoch but also on its literary theory and, most importantly, on its morality. Arguably, he was the best the early Third Republic could do along the lines of a Voltaire. Okay, so Zola was a good guy. But is Zola a true precursor of Wolfe as Wolfe implies? Does Wolfe follow in Zola's footsteps? Well, sort of, but not really.

Literary theorists have debated for a very long time the issue of authorial intentionality. Or, stated differently, the relevance of the author's own intentions to the finished text itself and the reader's understanding of it. The consensus that has evolved over the last quarter-century holds that meaning must be invested in the literary work, and that subsidiary enterprises by the author such as interviews and essays may elucidate that meaning but are not substitutes for it. If the proof is in the pudding, then the meaning is in the text, and nowhere else. Is Tom Wolfe a New World reincarnation of Zola as he intends himself to be? There are some interesting symmetries. Both are journalists. Both take their national metropolis as their personal journalistic beat while sometimes ranging farther afield. Both write fictional and nonfictional narrative. And, they are peers … at one century's remove (and I'll return to this later). Yet, there is a single and singular difference between the two, and one that overrides these several similarities. Zola was a moralist; moralists, almost invariably, are disenchanted with their times. For them, the time is always out of joint. Zola sympathized with workers and others who made up the impoverished class in late nineteenth century France; he sympathized with French Jews who suffered the scourge of anti-semitism.⁴ He was a social critic, not a satirist, not a social commentator, not a social observer, not a nineteenth century Tom Wolfe. When Zola went to the journalistic whip, he applied it to the backside of social oppression. Neither the “Experimental Novel” essay nor “J'accuse” addresses some local internecine squabble between middle-class, middle-aged, by-now establishment writers. Each is at root about a fundamentally unjust application of social power.

Mr. Wolfe is not a moralist, though I would hasten to add this is not an evil circumstance. Few major writers today are in fact old-school moralists. The pluralistic temper of the times does not allow bald proselytizing even among those would-be moralists in the writing community. Increasingly, writers simply lay out it out for readers and let them decide who's right, who's wrong, and who's beside-the-point. And what are Wolfe's views on the function of moralizing in literature? As he has pointed out as long ago as 1970 in an interview with Michael Dean and as recently as May 1990 in a real yawner of an interview with Bill Buckley on Firing Line, he's against it which I think is okay but then again he's not doing it à la Zola. And what does Wolfe think of contemporary American society? He thinks things are fine. In 1980, we find him bucking the widespread pessimism that ensued with the end of the Vietnam War, the heaveho of Nixon, and Carter's Iranian Waterloo by proclaiming that the 80s would be “a rather rosy ten years” (Scura, 128). And so they were of course … if ecology wasn't particularly important to one, if fiscal responsibility was low on one's list of priorities, if the decade provided the subject matter that inspires one to write a national bestseller. But there is nothing Zola-esque in these sentiments. There is no trace of Zola's righteous indignation, of his belief that society was racing toward moral and material chaos. (And we might take the powerful train scene that concludes La bête humaine as an encapsulation of Zola's outlook.)

And what serves as the Wolfian equivalent of Zola's “J'accuse”? Well, I think “Stalking” is Wolfe's “J'accuse” but, interestingly, curiously, this accusatory essay deals not with the fate of a nation, not with the human condition, but with an issue that is rather narrow in social terms, perhaps even parochial: what writers should do with their time. (And it is doubtful that Wolfe will ever face criminal prosecution for his essay as Zola did for his.) Wolfe has written a lot, and I have not read it all, but I think this is the first time that he has relinquished his sartorial logo, the white suit, for the cleric's basic black, and actually preached to his readers. And this is no polite, tolerant Unitarian tract but good ole downhome Virginny fire-and-brimstone. Writers of America reform yourselves or your work will be condemned to the everlasting fires of obscurity, also known as the remaindered tables of the nation's bookstores. But let me quote from the sermon:

Of one thing I am sure. If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life but also seized the high ground of literature itself.

(“Stalking,” 55)

Wow! Talk about high seriousness! Lighten up Tom. It's going to be alright. Hang in there. There's room in this here town for both you and them. At least that's what American publishing policies and readership patterns of the last quarter-century suggest.

In touting the cogency, the excellence, maybe even the genius of The Bonfire of the Vanities, “Stalking the Beast” invites scrutiny of the novel. And in closing, I would like to look briefly at that work though it deserves less perfunctory treatment than I'll give it here. I do not recall any first novel for which grander public claims have been made by its author. Will Bonfire save Am. Lit.? No, I don't think so for Am. Lit. is not quite so enfeebled as Wolfe would have it. (Indeed the only thing that has died lately, though Wolfe tries to resuscitate it, is talk of the death of the American novel.) A less easily answered question revolves around the novel's immediate value? For Tom Wolfe, both as journalist and novelist, the most important thing is simple temporal precedence, i.e., to be the first on the scene and not to get the scooped. Well, he sure hasn't been scooped often as a new journalist but I think he has been scooped the odd time as a novelist though there is no shame in that. Perhaps the journalistic analogy, with its assumption of a naked truth, doesn't even work in the field of fictional representation.

In “Stalking,” Wolfe chronicles his growing surprise and disappointment during the 60s and 70s at both the decline of realism and the failure of writers to write the story of New York City. And, he tells us, he wasn't alone.

Half the publishers along Madison Avenue … had their noses pressed up against their thermopane glass walls scanning the billion-footed city for the approach of the young novelists who, surely, would bring them the big novels of the racial clashes, the hippie movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam. But such creatures, it seemed, no longer existed.

(47)

Well, since he doesn't name the publishers, we'll just have to take his new-journalistic word for it. But have realism and NYC been neglected? Hardly. New York is without doubt the most written about locality in the U.S., probably in the Western world, and quite possibly in the universe. (There are many reasons for this but the four most important ones have to do with the city's large population, its economic clout, the presence of the bulk of major U.S. publishers, and, not least, its citizens’ preoccupation with themselves and NewYorkness.) In her 1982 study of the fictional portrayal of New York, Joan Zlotnick catalogues nearly 200 titles and she misses a few pre-1980 novels not to mention recent important works by the likes of McElroy, Doctorow, Gaddis, Vonnegut, and DeLillo. New York and its themes neglected? Get outta here, as they might say in the South Bronx. But what about realism? Maybe the Realism Quotient of these novels is too low. Let us consider that for a moment.

Just what is realism? Well, for Wolfe, it's a lot of things. It is a period designation as in the Age of Realism (1830–80) and its big-city writers, notably Balzac, Dickens, and Zola. But it is also an honorific term he assigns to those authors whose literary styles and perspectives he likes, namely a few early twentieth century American writers like Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Pearl Buck. For Wolfe's money, these writers have provided their readers what Lewis had demanded in his 1930 Nobel acceptance speech, a literature commensurate to America's “vastness” (48). Needless to say, Wolfe's is a very conservative canon, one not much different from that found in the more cautious undergrad syllabi of the 50s and 60s.

Wolfe neglects a crucial differentiation in his discussion of realism. I noted earlier, in an attempt at irony, that Zola and Wolfe are peers at the modest remove of a century or so. This needs restating. Zola and Wolfe are not peers but citizens of vastly different worlds. Because historical epochs are, by definition, fundamentally different, their literatures must also be fundamentally different if they are to be sensitive to the nuances of contemporary society, if, in short, they are to be “realistic” or mimetic. This is the thesis of Erich Auerbach's wonderful study of Western literature, Mimesis, a work whose cogency has only increased since its publication in the 40s. Wolfe implicitly knows this when he honors, quite legitimately, major “realists” of the past; he doesn't when he rebukes contemporary novelists. The postmodern period is unique in very many respects and I won't enumerate them all here—and indeed couldn't—but I'll cite a couple. The contemporary period is extremely heterogeneous in social terms. Its variegations are a direct result of the success of liberal democracy and its economic system, capitalism. Consequently, the fiction of the period reflects this dispersion of moral authority, of wealth, and, increasingly, of political power through the proliferation of themes and styles that characterizes contemporary American literature. Wolfe's many essays have in fact chronicled some of these developments in insightful and entertaining ways. His literary historiography has been less successful. We have then a curious tension between a journalist who understands the particular pressures, trends, and dispositions of his time and a literary critic who does not. And, interestingly, we find the same sort of schizophrenia in many marxian literary critics—Lukács and Fredric Jameson, for example—who, on the one hand, are very much aware of history and epochal shifts but who, on the other, rail against those novelists intent on depicting these same phenomena.

No one writer can write the quintessential “new social novel” in a period as diverse, as fragmented, as rich as ours. Such a novel can only be a composite of novels, a library in short. The most a novelist can do is to attend to those social facts—what Wolfe calls petits faits vrais—that he or she knows and cares about (55). This is the nature of postmodern mimesis, of contemporary realism. Whether we think of Gaddis's introspective Carpenter's Gothic—my own (current) choice for best American novel of the 80s—or Walter Abish's postmodern realism or Kathy Acker's punk feminist novels or DeLillo's great fictive conspiratorial webs or Wideman's powerful Philadelphia Fire, few postmodern works are bereft of substantive world-referential claims, few fail to wrestle in some way with “the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us” (55). While their aesthetic mediations are very diverse, these are the social novels of our time, for better or worse.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is Wolfe's attempt to deal with his vision of America in the 80s through the narrative conventions of past realisms. And, on first reading, one influenced by a familiarity with “Stalking the Beast,” I was tempted to say he failed because he succeeded. But, as I have suggested above, one needs to have a capacious view of postmodern realism if one is to have a capacious understanding of contemporary American society. Wolfe captures well the idioms and temperaments of NYC. He is, as always, excellent on surface detail, and the descriptions of clothing, interior decor, and architecture are very effective. Wolfe spent a lot of time and exertion stalking his billion-footed beast in the canyons of Wall Street and the badlands of the South Bronx. His novel has realism and we need only mention names like Bernhard Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Al Sharpton, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, to confirm the point. And did the great white-suited hunter bag the beast? Naw, but he got off his best shot, a good clean shot, as Hemingway would have said, and might even have drawn blood. And that's quite a lot. Besides, we learned a long time ago from Ike McCaslin that making the kill isn't the most important thing anyway.

Notes

1. In Fables of Fact, his fine study of New Journalism, John Hellmann expatiates on other similarities between the latter and the experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s (8–17).

2. Wolfe is obviously not alone in his criticism of postmodern fiction. A number of academics have been similarly hostile though their repudiation of it has typically had a strong moralistic tenor. See, for example, monographs by John Aldridge, Gerald Graff, and Charles Newman. I offer a critique of the latter in Contingent Meanings (7–21).

3. For a fairly comprehensive list of recent winners of major fiction awards, see the last several yearbooks of Dictionary of Literary Biography.

4. One recent biography points to the unflattering stereotypes of Jews in Zola's fiction as evidence of the author's own anti-semitism, claiming he only revised his position late in life in the early 90s. With regard to Zola's role in the Dreyfus Affair, Alan Schom goes so far as to say that Zola “was not so much a spokesman for Jews, as for principles” (146).

Works Cited

Aldridge, John. The American Novel and the Way We Live Now. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

Barth, John. “It's a Long Story.” Harper's (July 1990): 71–75, 78.

———“The Literature of Exhaustion.” Atlantic (August 1967): 29–34.

———“The Literature of Replenishment.” Atlantic (January 1980): 65–71.

Graff, Gerald. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.

Hellmann, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 3–32.

Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985.

Schom, Alan. Emile Zola: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

Scura, Dorothy M. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990.

Varsava, Jerry A. Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1990.

Wolfe, Tom. “The New Journalism.” The New Journalism. Ed. Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 3–52.

———“Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel.” Harper's (November 1989): 45–56.

Zoltnick, Joan. Portrait of an American City: The Novelists’ New York. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1982.