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This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term Surfiction for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.
This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federman’s creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet.
Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting.
Fiction. Jewish Studies. "Shhh, murmured my mother. And the first thirteen years of my life vanished into the darkness of that third floor closet." On a July morning in 1942, Raymond Federman's childhood ended, as his parents and two sisters were arrested by collaborationist French police and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, with Raymond alone evading capture. In SHHH, his final novel, Federman reconstructs this childhood out of fragments, speculations, and doubtful recollections--the stories of a lost life, enmeshed with a history that can never be forgotten. "Federman is inarguably one of the most significant vanguard writers of the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first"--Lance Olsen.
Federman's story is woven of fragments, branching out over a lifetime. His narrative spirals into a temporal abyss as he rummages in old memories marked with cabbages, plump breasts and the Final Solution. Aunt Rachel's Fur is aswirl with the narrative innovations that distinguish Federman as a leading experimental surfictioneer."--BOOK JACKET.
In 1963, renowned Franco-American author Raymond Federman - then a young academic, just fresh from defending his PhD - met Samuel Beckett in Paris. The meeting was to change his life. 'Sam' became both a great friend and a great source of inspiration to Federman throughout his writing career. Intensely moving and intensely funny by turns, this unique book is both a memoir of a friendship, and a typically Federman-esque tribute to Beckett and his work. The Sam Book brings together memories, anecdotes, extracts from articles and talks, and other pieces of writing that derive their inspiration directly from Beckett's work.
In this, his fifth novel in English (and its first paperback edition), the acclaimed French-born writer and poet, Raymond Federman, has given us the bittersweet tale of Moinous and Sucette who fall in love "across a smile" in Washington Square. Smiles on Washington Square is a charming and complex novel. With the masterful ease of a tightrope walker, Federman plays with our sense of time and space as he creates, with extraordinary compassion, a tale that makes us see our own vulnerability and worthiness. Stylistically, his links to Beckett are evident in the stripped down prose, the remarkable symbolism and word games, and in his focus on the downtrodden and inarticulate cast-aways of an industrialized world. Ultimately, Smiles on Washington Square is a book that teaches us there is no easy story, no safe entrance, no line of action not fraught with obstacles and humiliation; but finally, in the face of the inevitable disappointment of the human condition, Federman shows us how sweet possibility is.
This first full-length study of leading contemporary writers Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman defines the difference between modern and postmodern writers as the distinction between mimetic and performance art. Larry McCaffery notes that "Kutnik's thesis is that performance art engages the artist and the audience in a process whose function is fundamentally different from the mimetic tradition... that is, rather than aiming at representing some preexisting state of affairs, performance art seeks to be an experience for its own sake, an experience which is ultimately to be recognized as continuous with reality and not merely an occasion for interpretation and analysis." Postmodernists such as Sukenick and Federman spotlight themselves in the act of writing. Thus their creations have a life of their own, and the act of writing is so much a part of that life that the process of creation is as important as the end product. Kutnik's metaphor for this process is performance art.
This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federman's creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet.
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