Some time ago, I taught Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch (2009) and then, a little later, The Plains (1982) in two separate undergraduate courses. Each course was concerned, in specific ways, with postmodernism.
Already by then a rather outdated term, “postmodernism” never quite gelled with Murnane’s writing. But what I really wanted was for my students to read these unusual books in which “very little happens”.
