This past year, with the help of a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Huntington Library-USC Institute on California and the West, I am expanding my research toward a book project on the relationship between postmodern literature and the cultural politics in the sixties and seventies. In particular, I am interested in exploring how the periodizing concept of postmodernism relates to a very different, but nonetheless overlapping, temporal schema called the “Age of Reagan.” The contemporaneous history of New Right’s historical ascendance has remained a largely unexamined aspect of postmodernism’s conceptualization. But this neglected counter-politics raises critical questions for postmodernism: how, for example, the figure of political authority relates to the politics of pure textuality and difference; or how experimental language practices relate to the fragile legacy of liberalism. By restoring postmodern literature to this context of political engagement and conflict–reading Pynchon’s dispersive narrative forms together with The Pentagon Papers, Ishmael Reed’s vaudevillian prose together with the white conspiracy culture of Watergate, the experiments of the Language poets together with Reagan’s “Master Plan for Higher Education”–I examine how the dramatic shift to the right in the wake of the Vietnam War influences postmodern literary forms. My Huntington-USC fellowship in California has given me access to the rich archives of those institutions and also proximity to the Reagan and Nixon memorial libraries where I have been researching what I will call the “far side of postmodernism.”