SOURCE: “William Gass: A ‘Purified Modernist’ in a Postmodern World,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 124-30.

In the following essay, Dyck examines underlying modernist aspects of Gass's postmodern literary and theoretical perspective, including comparative analysis of Gass's story “Icicles” and Wright Morris's novel Ceremony in Lone Tree. “Although modernist in its formal aesthetics,” Dyck writes, “Gass's world of words reflects a postmodern perspective on contemporary culture.”

I don't regard myself as a postmodernist. … I prefer to think of myself as a purified modernist. In architecture that would mean modernism without social content: Corbusier not building for society.

—William Gass¹

When William Gass claims, “I think that literature is not a form of communication,”² he seems to preclude a social interpretation of his work. “Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art,”³ he asserts. Baudelaire made this claim in the context...