Analysis Of Enormous Changes At The Last Minute

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"Enormous Changes at the Last Minute:" Postmodern Humanism in the Short Fiction of Grace Paley(1)

On the jacket of her second book of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley, a feminist, postmodernist, antiwar activist, and writer, identifies herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist." In 1979, she was arrested on the White House lawn for demonstrating against nuclear weapons, and her résumé is full of such protest-related arrests. Paley's statement in a 1998 interview with the online magazine Salon is typical: "Whatever your calling is, whether it's as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there's a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it." …show more content…

I am indebted to Todd Davis for presenting this postmodern possibility and for providing me with the terminology to explain it. Davis's work with Vonnegut's postmodern humanism has helped me define the parameters of my argument here.

2 See the title story from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
3 Hassan is quoting Susan Sontag, "One Culture and the New Sensibility," in Against Interpretation, 1967, pp. 293-304 and Leslie Fiedler, "Cross the Border-Close that Gap," in Collected Essays vol. 2, New York, 1971, pp. 461-85.

4 This is the title of Paley's first short story collection (1959).
5 In an essay titled "Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen: Radical Jewish Humanists," John Clayton writes that "it is our common life, our common pain, that concerns [Paley] In the stories of how many modern writers do we hear of collective experience?" (qtd. in Aarons 3). Davis writes of Lyotard's petite histoire as "provisional narratives that may serve as tools for daily, localized living, a contingent morality that is never grounded in presence but, rather, works with an awareness of its own constructedness toward a symbolic vision of a better reality" …show more content…

"Apocalyptic Grumbling: Postmodern Humanism in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut." Forthcoming in At Millennium's End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. State University of New York Press, 2001.

Hassan, Ihab. "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism." Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. Eds. Paula Geyh,

Fred G. Leebron, Andrew Levy. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. 586-595.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. "Grace Paley: The Sociology of Metafiction" Delta 14 (May 1982): 81-85.

Paley, Grace. "All My Habits Are Bad." Interview with A.M. Homes. Salon.com. 26 Oct. 1998. .

---. "A Conversation with My Father." Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. 1960. New York: Ferrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. 159-67.

---. "Debts." Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. 1960. New York: Ferrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. 7-12.

---. "Listening." Later the Same Day. New York: Penguin, 1985. 206-219.

---. "The Pale Pink Roast." Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. Eds. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, Andrew
Levy. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. 94-99.

Schleifer, Ronald. "Grace Paley: Chaste Compactness." Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Eds. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Schlick. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985.

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