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(On Not) Eliding Class: Working Class-Consciousness, Rock & Roll Culture, And Narrative Self-Referentiality In The Fiction Of Denis Johnson, David Buehrer

A Conference on Class Consciousness and Popular Culture

When he died from liver cancer in 2017, Denis Johnson was rightly hailed as a genre-defying writer, a “storyteller fluent in […] the transcendence of compassion” (Seaman 26), whose visionary scope and lyrical intensity differentiated him from many of his contemporaries. His career spanned some forty years and evinced an astonishing range, including nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, five collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. But consistent across Johnson’s oeuvre was an ability to inject both black humor and tragic seriousness, including a quest for the spiritual, within characters afflicted …