About Post45

A Collective of Scholars Working on American Literature and Culture after 1945

With the 20th century officially closed, it has become imperative to reconsider scholarly and pedagogical approaches to American literary and cultural developments of the second half of that century and into the twenty-first. Now that the cold war and even the sixties look increasingly like history (certainly to our students), the time is ripe for assessing the models of inquiry and the canons they have produced with the hope of generating broader frames of analysis and more integrated approaches to the period. To that end Post•45, a collective of younger scholars in the field, gathers in the fall of each year to exchange work in progress, fostering substantive debate on central questions in the field among those who will shape it in the coming years.

The motivation behind the group's formation is somewhat polemical: the "field" as it is currently constituted has suffered from reductive framesaesthetic, political, historical, and genericproduced during the period, but which fail to address the diversity of cultural expression or to offer coherent ways of managing it. The aim of the collective is thus to put critical pressure on current disciplinary conventions for separating out one mode of discursive practice from another.  Might, for instance, "postmodernism"the experimental and often cerebral writing of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Don DeLillolook different if understood less as the aesthetic heir of modernism and more as animated by specific postwar political-theoretical paradigms and values? Might we uncover obscured dimensions of such divergent aesthetic practices as Sloan Wilson's realism, Frank O'Hara's avant-gardism, Toni Morrison's magical racialism, and Hollywood melodrama if examined through the sociologist David Riesman's account of consumerism as a mode of self-development? How might an historical analysis of postwar American religiosity reshape the way we read Flannery O'Connor, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka? How might a study of the postwar demographic transformation of the university help us reconsider the social function of aesthetic value itself? How do developments in the media beyond literature become entwined with contemporary writing?

The Post45 collective was founded in 2006 with a sense of optimism and opportunity. It seeks quickly to take advantage of the best scholarly and pedagogical work accomplished in this newly vital field in order to create more capacious models for ourselves, our students, and most particularly our graduate students, who will take up the next generation of research. It also seeks to advance more useful modes of presentation and discussion of scholarly work, through its characteristically small symposia, an emphasis on reading precirculated papers, and a tradition of spirited discussion. Our web presence seeks to extend these forms of collaboration and interaction between scholars, teachers and students so that we can discuss new work year-round and more fully realize the potential of contemporary web publishing for scholars.

Post45 Steering Committee:
J.D. Connor, Harvard University
Florence Dore, Kent State University
Mary Esteve, Concordia University
Andrew Hoberek, University of Missouri
Amy Hungerford, Yale University
Sean McCann, Wesleyan
Deak Nabers, Brown University
Deborah Nelson, University of Chicago
Michael Szalay, UC-Irvine