World-Games : Routledge : 9781032841298 : 103284129X : 31 Oct 2024 : Contemporary readers face a literature that seems to 'speak for' them, yet they often struggle to say just how or why. Out of the deluge of works from such writers as Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Borges, Brooke-Rose, Burroughs, Butor, Calvino, Cortázar, Federman, Fuentes, Le Guin, Márquez, McElroy, Nabokov, O'Brien, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Sanguineti, Sarraute, Sollers, Sukenick, Tolkien, Vonnegut, new words and world-models that demand understanding fill the air. Yet they seem frequently beyond reach because the framework of ideas within which this often brilliant but seemingly bewilderingly disparate flood of discourses might make sense remains largely unexpressed. Beginning with the first concisely concerted assessment in English of the premisses and practice of Realism as viewed by those who feel that there is no choice but to move on, this book (first published in 1987) confronts the vocabulary and rhetoric of cur