Difficulties with Pre-Post-Modern Stereotypes and Tradition

Abstract

The post-war period seems to generate an acute sense of amnesia which results in the commonly acknowledged difficulty of the arts to address most of the extremely disturbing dilemmas of the fifties and the sixties. I use John Fowles’ The Collectorand Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaintto illustrate the two otherwise obviously different writers’ ambition to reformulate thetraditional andfashionable artistic forms of expression and prepare for the disturbing postmodern approaches of their later books.