SOURCE: "Contemporary Short Fiction and the Postmodern Condition," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 147-59.

In the following essay, Clark examines the viability of the short story in the age of postmodernist literature.)

Entangled on one side with the tribe, on another with the marketplace, the short story inhabits postmodernity differently from the novel. It moves differently, and in ways still unarticulated, on the force field of contemporary culture, participating in what Fredric Jameson has called a "revival of storytelling knowledge" in the postmodern world and giving voice to the increased "vitality of small narrative units" (Foreword xi) but inadequately explained with respect both to its modernist precursors in Chekhov, Joyce, and Welty and to its raw materials, life at the end of the twentieth century.

While a few story writers (Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, and Max Apple, among them) have advanced under...