The idea for this study came to me in the course of my reading of innova- tive US-American! fiction of the last three decades. I observed that much of it is cast in the comic mode - or, more precisely, that there seems to be in contemporary fiction an affinity between 'innovation' and 'the comic' and that this affinity, furthermore, appears to be characteristic of postmo- dernism. It is obvious, at the same time, that comic has become an elusive and,...