The difference in how Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison conceived of Black subjectivity has profound consequences for how we understand the audience of African American literature in the contemporary period. While Ellison assumed that the Black subject is invisible because whites fail to recognize African American humanity and complexity, Morrison understood herself to be both legible and embraced by her Black community. Ellison and Morrison represent twin poles for the consideration of such issues as the implicit desire for white validation to the bold expectation that Black life not be explained to outsiders. Evidence of Ellison and Morrison’s respective approach to Black literature is reflected in two recent texts by prominent African American writers. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019) both highlight how key aspects of Black life remain invisible to white observers while also using readerly intimacy as a potent force for social change. These texts demonstrate the continued tension of presenting Black writing within a national landscape dominated by white hegemonic power.

6. Age of Iron is explored with relation to secularism, the psycho-social theories of Georges Bataille, angelhood, and the poetics of Rilke.

This chapter explores the relation between the novel form and the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism and posthumanism in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the relation between the prosthetic and the simulacral, under postmodern conditions, and with the technological revolution associated with the advent of computing. The novel, it suggests, from Orwell to Brooke-Rose, is involved in a difficult relationship with postmodernism, one which gives expression to its possibilities, while also seeking to resist its erosion of the materiality of our cultures and environments. It traces a strand of experimental realism in the postwar novel that is at odds with the terms in which we have conceived of postmodern fiction. It then goes on to read two of the novelists who are associated with the postmodern novel – Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison – to suggest that one can detect a persistent opposition in their work between the simulacrum and the prosthetic, one which helps us see past some of the contradictions that are the result of our existing accounts of postmodern politics and aesthetics.