The Avant-Postman

The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s "revolution of the word" in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines through the work of more than fifty writers up to the present, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, B. S. Johnson, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Georges Perec, Kathy Acker, Iain Sinclair, Hélène Cixous, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five writing strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologising the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.

Vichnar assesses over fifty authors in eight chapters, spending from four to upwards of a dozen pages on each. Engagement with each author ranges from brief overview to deep assessment of multiple texts.The organization of each chapter with subsections and headings is user friendly. The Avant-Postman is successful in locating and contextualizing some of the sprawling echoes of Joyce’s influence in English- and French-language fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book will be of interest to Joyceans and anyone concerned with postwar avant-garde writing, as well as researchers interested in the many authors and movements discussed throughout.
Bryan Counter, Joseph Labine (Studies in the Novel, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2025, pp. 253–255)