Strategies

Time

• Melanctha
• On the Road
• Gravity's Rainbow (former Slothrops)
• Ceremony?
• Neuromancer (toward futurity - looking back)
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (performative time - game time)

Environment

• Land of Little Rain
• Gravity's Rainbow (overlaying land with desire)
• White Noise
• Ceremony
• Merwin / Ginsberg / Eliot

Hybridity - Identity

• Ceremony
• Passing
• Gravity's Rainbow
• Neuromancer
• Twilight
• Zoot Suit

Race - Region

• Absalom, Absalom!
• Three Lives (Melanchtha)
• Ma Rainey / Twilight / Zoot Suit
• Ceremony

Identity - Race (Hybridity)

• Ceremony
• Passing
• Souls of Black Folk
• Invisible Man
• Twilight / Zoot Suit

Experimental Form

• Twilight
• Gravity's Rainbow
• Pound / Eliot
• Forty Stories
• Armies of the Night
• Counterlife
• The Things They Carried

Modernisms

• The Sun Also Rises
• Absalom, Absalom!
• Three Lives
• Grapes of Wrath
• Midcentury Modernism (Rabbit, Run / In Cold Blood)

Postmodernisms

• Gravity's Rainbow (formal/world) 
• White Noise (world)
• Forty Stories (formal)
• Twilight (citational)
• John Ashbery
• Ceremony

Modern to Postmodern

• House of Mirth (for underpinning of social machine?)
• Eliot Pound (citational style)
• Gravity's Rainbow (retains Modernist structuring, but em-plots dissolution) 

Role of Realism

• Rabbit, Run
• Cathedral
• House of Mirth
• White Noise
• In Cold Blood (Nature Mort)

Extended Naturalism

• House of Mirth (stable)
• White Noise
• In Cold Blood
• Cathedral
• Rabbit, Run (social world without motivation)

Borders - Region

• Ceremony
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Zoot Suit
• Gravity's Rainbow
• On the Road

Borders - Hybrids

• Ceremony
• Gravity's Rainbow
• Neuromancer (real/virtual border)
• Passing (race borders)
• Absalom, Absalom! (race borders / Jim Bond)

Travel - Migration (Diaspora)

• Grapes of Wrath
• Zoot Suit
• The Souls of Black Folk
• Borderlands/La Frontera

Travel - Adventure (Identity)

• On the Road (movement itself)
• Gravity's Rainbow (dissolution without narrative drive) 
• Long Day's Journey into Night (traveling actor)
• Death of a Salesman (he's big in the north, always away from home)
• The Counterlife (narrative adventure / trip to Israel) 

Region - Identity 

• The Great Gatsby (a midwestern century)
• Absalom, Absalom! (south's identity)
• The Grapes of Wrath (midwestern diaspora)
• Ceremony (adaptable / attachment to land)
• Frank O'Hara (new york) Gwendolyn Brooks (north east?)
• Zoot Suit / Twilight (LA)

Americanness

• Lolita (motel life)
• Gravity's Rainbow (America returns to Europe)
• On the Road (travel)
• The Great Gatsby (midwest come east)

Technology - Identity/Hybridity

• Gravity's Rainbow (interactions with material/tech)
• Ceremony (modern ceremony)
• Neuromancer (cybernetics)
• White Noise (consumer life)
• John Ashbery (mirror, painting) / Allen Ginsberg (trampled nature) / T.S. Eliot (bleak nature)
• House of Mirth (society)
• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (sound recording)

Family

• Long Day's Journey into Night
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Absalom, Absalom!
• Ceremony

Cars

• On the Road
• The Great Gatby
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Lolita
• Rabbit, Run
• White Noise
• Death of Salesman

War

• Ceremony
• The Things They Carried
• The Sun Also Rises
• Gravity's Rainbow
• The Armies of the Night

For a modernism or postmodernism question: play the middle off of the edges. How does In Clood Blood pose a challenge to an easy division between modern and pomo? Its highly structured and highly composite form makes it difficult to discern reality from fiction. These tropes, however, don't enter the text in an explicit way.