Federman's Fictions

Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust

Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Introduction by Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Preface by Charles Bernstein
Afterword by Raymond Federman

Subjects: Literary Criticism, Postmodernism, Holocaust Studies, Literary Theory, Philosophy Of Literature
Paperback : 9781438433820, 350 pages, January 2012
Hardcover : 9781438433813, 350 pages, January 2011

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Table of contents

Preface
Some Answers for Raymond Federman
Charles Bernstein

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Other Voices: The Fiction of Raymond Federman
Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Part I. A Life in the Text

1. Beckett and Beyond: Federman the Scholar
Jerome Klinkowitz

2. How, and How Not, to Be a Published Novelist: The Case of Raymond Federman
Ted Pelton

3. Samuel Beckett and Raymond Federman: A Bilingual Companionship
Daniela Hurezanu

4. Filling in the Blanks: Raymond Federman, Self-Translator
Alyson Waters

5. Re-Double or Nothing: Federman, Autobiography, and Creative Literary Criticism
Larry McCaffery

Part II. Philosophy of Literature

6. A Narrative Poetics of Raymond Federman
Brian McHale

7. Surfiction, Not Sure Fiction: Raymond Federman's Second-Degree Textual Manipulations
Davis Schneiderman

8. Raymond Federman, the Ultimate Metafictioneer
Eckhard Gerdes

9. Formulating Yet Another Paradox: Raymond Federman's Real Fictitious Discourses
Thomas Hartl

10. The Agony of Unrecognition: Raymond Federman and Postmodern Theory
Eric Dean Rasmussen

11. Raymond Federman and Critical Theory
Jan Baetens

Part III. Laughter, History, and the Holocaust

12. Surviving in the Corridors of History or, History as Double or Nothing
Dan Stone

13. When Postmodern Play Meets Survivor Testimony: Federman and Holocaust Literature
Susan Rubin Suleiman

14. “In Black Inkblood”: Agonistic and Cooperative Authorship in the (Re)Writing of History
Marcel Cornis-Pope

15. Cosmobabble or, Federman’s Return
Christian Moraru

16. Featherman’s Body Literature or, the Unbearable Lightness of Being
Michael Wutz

17. Federman’s Laughterature
Menachem Feuer

Afterword
Critifictional Reflections on the Novel Today
Raymond Federman

About the Contributors
Index

A comprehensive examination of one of the twentieth century's most innovative writers and critics.

Description

This collection of essays offers an authoritative examination and appraisal of the French-American novelist Raymond Federman's many contributions to humanities scholarship, including Holocaust studies, Beckett studies, translation studies, experimental fiction, postmodernism, and autobiography. Although known primarily as a novelist, Federman (1928–2009) is also the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. After emigrating to the United States in 1942 and receiving a Ph. D. in comparative literature at UCLA in 1957, he held professorships in the University at Buffalo's departments of French and English from 1964 to 1999. Together with Steve Katz and Ronald Sukenick, he was one of the original founders of the Fiction Collective, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to avant garde, experimental prose. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers who pioneered "metafictional" or "postmodern" American literature. Federman's Fiction will introduce (or, for some, reintroduce) to the broader scholarly community a creative and daring thinker whose work is significant not just to considerations of the development of innovative fiction, but to a number of other distinct disciplines and emerging critical discourses.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is also editor and publisher of the American Book Review and editor-in-chief of symplokē, a journal of comparative literature and theory. His books include Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (coedited with R. M. Berry), also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"…a scholarly and well thought out compendium of literary criticism. " — Library Bookwatch