Literary Endgames: The Post-Literary, Postcritique, and the Death of/in Contemporary Literature

Since the millennium, contemporary novelists have produced innovative works of fiction that rely upon an in-built awareness of the novel’s demise in a post-literary age. Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro and J.M. Coetzee utilize the exhaustion of the novel form to hone a new realism more attentive to the repressed forms of embodied life that underpin the novel’s tradition of liberal humanism. Whilst other critics have noted how contemporary fictions produce new forms of (non)human subjectivity by estranging the forms of the novel, this essay emphasizes the fundamental contingency of the materialism presented by each of the postmillennial novels discussed here. To be embodied in space is also to be embedded in time. I trace how the postmillennial novel underwrites this insight by framing life as necessarily bound to death. This sense of living through death – through a relation to ending – is seen as fundamentally modernist and I trace its theoretical articulation in the narratologies of Frank Kermode and Walter Benjamin. Finally, I explore how this co-implication of life and death emerges through a post-literary esthetic that disturbs some of the key arguments behind the coeval movement of postcritique.