Major modern American authors such as Norman Mailer, Joan Didion & James Ellroy are all haunted by "crises of visual experience," according to this major new study of contemporary fiction. The author examines American writing & its "politics of seeing": the ways in which mass spectacle has transformed postmodern culture & its literary figures. Cohen argues that the current trends in fiction have been created by the pervasive force of spectacle in American culture, a crisis that leads authors to invent new & diverse ways of visualizing & narrating the world. Embedded in these constructed world views are very different & conflicting politics of gender, mass culture & postmodern society. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Cohen terms this kind of writing "allegorical" - characterized by perpetual interpretation rather than transparent communication. According to Cohen, a shifting & disruptive visual culture repeatedly frustrates the desire for a secure & universal form of narration in the texts dissected here.