The Post-postmodern Reconstruction of Human Values in Karen Russell's "Vampire in the Lemon Grove," A. J. Finn's Woman in the Window, and Dave Eggers's The Circle

In the last decade, many theorists and scholars, such as David Foster, Linda Hutcheon, and Ihab Hassan, announced the death of postmodernism and declared the arrival of post-postmodernism. Post-postmodernism represents a reaction against postmodernism. It does not reject postmodernism but is considered a move beyond it to explore the possibility of representation again. Post-postmodernism focuses on reconstructing humanist values and exploring emotion instead of postmodern irony and self-reflexivity. Therefore, literature plays an essential role in reconstructing these values. Post-postmodern novelists mainly engage in social issues ranging from politics to ecology. This concern about human values and communication leads post-postmodern novelists to return to realism for different reasons. They do not try to represent reality as modernist novelists, but they criticize social and political issues in their societies. This paper deals with the value of human communication in Karen Russell's short story "Vampires in the Lemon Grove," A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window, and Dave Eggers's The Circle. In The Circle, for example, Eggers criticizes contemporary social media and data collection not with postmodern fragmentation techniques but by returning to realist aesthetics to create a dystopian novel. He creates a parallel between a fictional digital company and the real Facebook and Google to shed light on the importance of constructing humanist values.