Jerome Klinkowitz takes questions from an undergraduate class taught by Larry McCaffery. Klinkowitz expounds on his idea that contemporary modernist writers are not writing fiction in a way that reflects the world around them, noting several examples and honing in on a 1960 quote from Philip Roth about fiction not being able to express the current world properly. Klinkowitz compares what Kurt Vonnegut does with his fiction with abstract expressionist painters. Klinkowitz explains that he despaired over the state of contemporary fiction in the late sixties before discovering the humor in works by such authors as Vonnegut and Ronald Sukenick.
