Robert Coover

Resumen En Briar Rose, Robert Coover recurre una vez más al repertorio de los cuentos tradicionales, que ya había empleado en los relatos de Pricksong & Descants, para crear su propia versión de la Bella durmiente. Para comprender la complejidad de la materia que converge en Briar Rose, es preciso sumar, a los intertextos que la crítica ha señalado (es decir, los cuentos de los hermanos Grimm, Perrault y Basile), las versiones que los precedieron en la tradición occidental del motivo. Esa ampliación de la perspectiva permitirá apreciar cómo la repetición y la variante-recursos que Coover, así como otros autores posmodernistas, ha utilizado para deconstruir la narrativa tradicional-son, paradójicamente, elementos centrales que han cimentado la pervivencia de ese relato a través de los siglos. Palabras clave: Bella durmiente, Robert Coover, recreación, cuento tradicional, hipertexto. REPETITION AND VARIANT IN THE TIMES OF HYPERTEXT. FROM SLEEPING BEAUTY TO BRIAR ROSE, BY ROBERT COOVER Abstract In Briar Rose, Robert Coover resorts once again to the repertoire of traditional tales, which he had already employed in the Pricksong & Descants stories, to create his own version of Sleeping Beauty. In order to understand the complexity of the matter converging on Briar Rose, it is necessary to add, to the intertexts that the critics have pointed out (that is, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Perrault and Basile), the versions that preceded them in the Western tradition of the motif. This widening of the perspective will allow us to appreciate how repetition and variant-resources that Coover, as well as other postmodernist authors, has used to deconstruct the traditional narrative-are, paradoxically, central elements that have cemented the survival of that tale through the centuries.

Female monsters, whether it is the wicked witch, the blood-thirsty vampire, or the lust-driven succubus, have always been present in a significant number of short stories, novels, horror movies, and folkloric tales. The very word "monster" conjures up feelings of terror and fear, as these strange creatures are typically perverted, evil, and blood-curdling. In her brilliant work, The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed argues that women are represented as monsters in regards to their reproductive and mothering functions.
This paper applies the theory of the monstrous feminine examined by Barbara Creed on four postmodern versions of “Snow White”: Angela Carter's short story titled “The Snow Child” from her collection The Bloody Chamber, Neil Gaiman's short story titled “Snow, Glass, Apples” as well as “The Sleeper and the Spindle”, and finally Robert Coover's short story “The Dead Queen”. The main goal of the research paper is to identify the main elements of the monstrous feminine in each story and to provide a clear contrast with the traditional version of the celebrated tale. This research paper also examines how Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection ties into the concept of the monstrous feminine in terms of the previously mentioned postmodern works.
To understand the subverted postmodern world of Snow White and to demonstrate the monstrous feminine, it is mandatory to provide a brief presentation of the origin of fairy tales as exemplified by Jack Zipes, Ruth B. Bottingheimer, and Maria Tatar. Given the above, this thesis demonstrates the presence of the monstrous feminine in the works of Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and Neil Gaiman, and seeks out to compare and contrast the archetype of the pure and the wicked woman in terms of the characters of Snow White and the Queen.

Since the 1940s, comics have played an important role in the American cultural
landscape, constantly reinterpreting, institutionalizing and reinventing former cultural experiences
such as non-graphic literature, cinema, and photography. Postmodernist fiction related to comics
not only through the appropriation of themes and characters, but also by re-adapting narrative
structures and textual strategies typical of comic books, such as the violent juxtaposition of scenes
and the use of stratified frames. On the other end, postmodernist techniques eventually contributed
to the evolution of comics into the graphic novel form, that added a degree of permanence to
an entertainment object which started and developed mainly as a disposable one. Far from being a
mere “translation” or a derivative work, Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass:
The Graphic Novel shows how an allegedly “simple” medium such as comics is able to reinvent
the full narrative potential also of insistently language-oriented texts. The authors do not just
“translate” Auster’s text; they “adapt” the poetics of postmodernist fiction, inventing a “visual
poetics” for their medium. The graphic novel’s visual dimension adds further levels to the narrative
instability of the text, by inventing visual metaphors and emphasizing similarities and parallels
that in the original text remained underground.

This dissertation, submitted in 2013 towards an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, focuses on the application of the cognitive poetic framework of Text World Theory to the postmodernist short story ‘Matinée’ by Robert Coover. First taking a micro-analytical approach, it identifies the complex text world makeup of a section of the text which would, from a structuralist narratological position, be more simplistically described in terms of ‘levels’ or ‘frames’, revealing how one such level/frame is able to appear more ‘real’ than another. It then highlights the importance of accessibility relations in determining the ontological status of text worlds, and looks at how ambiguous focalization and the destabilisation of the narrator’s authority both severely attenuate the concept of accessibility. Moving on to a macro-analytical approach, this dissertation identifies the overarching ontological structure established by the text and explores the subsequent breakdown of this structure, which, it suggests, is aided by the aforementioned weakening of accessibility relations. Finally, this is tied into the postmodernist concept of the ‘ontological imperative’ (Bukatman, 2002, p. 162), and it is concluded that ‘Matinée’, as a postmodernist text, inscribes within itself an ontological distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, only to reveal the arbitrariness of that distinction.

Ever since its early modern inception as a literary genre unto its own, the fairy tale has frequently provided authors with a textual space in which to reflect on the nature, status and function of their own writing and that of literature in general. At the same time, it has served as an ideal laboratory for exploring and experimenting with the boundaries of literary convention and propriety. While scholarship pertaining to these phenomena has focused primarily on the fairy-tale adaptations and deconstructions of postmodern(ist) writers, this essay collection adopts a more diachronic approach. It offers fairy-tale scholars and students a series of theoretical and literary-historical expositions, as well as case studies on English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, and Romanian texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, by authors as diverse as Marie-Catherine dAulnoy, Rikki Ducornet, Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Coover.

The appearance of digital technology radically altered the way we create, read and think of texts. In contrast to the generally internalized notions of coherent narrative, unchanging text, monolithic authorship and one-way flow of information suggested by printed works, the emergence of hypertext correspond to the ethos of fluidity, multivocality and interactivity. Since the paradigmatic shift to the dominance of nonlinearity is still in progress, it is useful to examine texts that foreshadow the peculiarities of the approaching era within the limitations of print culture.
The first part of the thesis provides a theoretical framework in which three types of linearity – story, reading and transmission – are identified. These axes can be subverted by multiplication and fragmentation. What follows is a richly illustrated overview of methods of defying the above linearities.
The second part includes analyses of three distinctly nonlinear texts: Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse’, Coover’s ‘The Magic Poker’ and finally Nabokov’s Pale Fire. They employ various techniques of breaking the aforementioned linearities. Moreover, the disruption of the axes bears narrative relevance in these works, demonstrating how nonlinearity can be an organizing principle.

Traditionally, the historical novel aims at representing – or inventing – characters from the past, by recreating the historical reality in which they acted and lived. What happens, however, when reality itself becomes grotesque, banal, absurd, or embarrassing, resulting less credible than any fictitious representation? When every historical or documentary reconstruction is seen as unreliable, idiosyncratic, dubious, or suspect? This essay analyzes Robert Coover’s postmodernist historical novel, "The Public Burning" (1977), in the light of György Lukács’s classical definition of the genre;
taking its cue from theorizations by Umberto Eco, Hayden White, and Linda Hutcheon, the essay aims at understanding whether (and how) postmodernist works such as Coover’s are still to be considered “historical novels” in the traditional sense. Hopefully, such an analysis will shed new light on the complex relationship between history, narration, and fiction in the second half of the twentieth century.

Dieser Band bietet eine Einführung in theoretische Grundlagen und zentrale Aspekte der Bezüglichkeit von Texten und Medien. Er verfolgt die Entwicklung von der klassischen Intertextualitäts- (Genette, Kristeva) zur neueren Intermedialitätsforschung (Rajewsky, Paech), behandelt aber auch die Frage der Kombination und Konkurrenz von Medien vom Wettstreit der Künste in der Antike und Frühen Neuzeit bis hin zur zeitgenössischen Medienkonvergenz. Drei ausführliche Analysekapitel stellen Anwendungsmöglichkeiten anhand literarischer und audiovisueller Beispiele vor.

------> Now available as open-source e-book at https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/uscpress_pub/7/ <------

_Unvarnishing Reality_ draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations--including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov." ///// REVIEWS:

"The breadth of Maus's critical reading is impressive and sets his text apart from other treatments of Cold War literature that include Soviet and/or Russian material.[...] Highly recommended."

  -- Brian Diemert, _Choice_ (Dec. 2011) /////

"Maus's study constantly engages in suggestive juxtapositions between American and Russian works that shed fresh light on their narrative practices."

  -- David Seed, _Utopian Studies_ 23.2 (2012) /////

"Maus has read voluminously in his subject, both in the literature and in critical studies [...]. He is to be applauded for his fresh readings of dystopian classics as well as for bringing lesser-known writers into the story.[...] If a reader is looking for a quick survey of Russian and American Cold War fiction, this is it."

    -- Denise Youngblood, _Slavic Review_ 71.3 (Fall 2012) /////

"Maus’s analysis of the individual texts will give the reader new ways of thinking about them. Historians who work on the cultural history of the era will no doubt want to consider the insights he offers into the language and philosophy of satirical fiction."

  -- Mara Drogan, _Cold War History_ 13.2 (2013) /////

"On the US side, the closest analogy to the totalitarian system is the totalizing drive of certain languages—anticommunist, mediatic-consumerist, bureaucratic, technologically utopian—chiefly in the American 1950s and then again in the 1980s [...] To be sure, none of these coalesce into the langue de bois (the “wooden tongue”) that all but takes over public discourse in the East, nor do they enjoy the logistical and institutional backing afforded by the Kremlin apparatus, Pynchonian paranoia notwithstanding. And yet, Maus is right: the satire of mainstream, institutional, or 'official' idioms is one kind of literature that formally and thematically can be said to bring together—and thus render comparable—writers from saliently different systems."

  -- Christian Moraru, _American Literature_ 85.2 (June 2013)

In her seminal book on metafiction, Patricia Waugh describes this practice as an obliteration of the distinction between " creation " and " criticism. " Sukenick's The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. The article considers the ways in which the voice of the literary critic is incorporated into each work in the form of a self-reflexive commentary. Although the ostensible principle of metafiction is to merge fiction and criticism, most of the self-conscious texts under discussion are shown to adopt a predominantly negative attitude towards the critical voices they embody – by making them sound pompous, pretentious or banal. The article concludes with a claim that the five works do not advocate a rejection of academic criticism but rather insist on its reform. Their dissatisfaction with the prescriptivism of most contemporary literary criticism is compared to Susan Sontag's arguments in her essay " Against Interpretation. " Keywords: metafiction, American literature, academic fiction, postmodernism, experimental literature, scholars as fictionists, fiction vs literary criticism

Resumo: Este artigo tem como objetivo mostrar como o autor contemporâneo Robert
Coover subverte o mito bíblico de José e Maria no conto “J´s marriage”. O escritor
norte-americano chama atenção para o fato de que se um mito não for eficaz, torna-se apenas ficção, como no conto citado, em que José e Maria se destacam por suas
formas humanizadas. Coover, dessa maneira, leva seus leitores a questionarem a fé
nos mitos e perceberem que sem polemizá-los, a ordem social, política e religiosa
(dependendo do mito) permanecerá a mesma. O objetivo principal do autor é compor
um novo texto, com novas possibilidades de leitura, que subverte os elementos
tradicionais da narrativa e exige do leitor um trabalho de reconstrução e
problematização da ordem vigente por meio do mito bíblico.

Palavras-chave: Literatura contemporânea. Literatura norte-americana. Robert
Coover. Mitos Bíblicos.

Abstract: This article aims to show how contemporary author Robert Coover subverts
Joseph and Mary`s biblical myth in “J´s marriage” short story. The American writer
calls attention to the fact that if a myth is not effective, it is only fiction, as quoted in
the story, where Mary and Joseph stand out for their humanized forms. Coover, thus,
leads his readers to question their faith in myths and realize that without polemicizing
them, the social, political and religious orders (depending on the myth) will be always
the same.The author main aim is to make up a new text, with new possibilities of
reading, that subvert the traditional elements that compose the narrative and require
from the readers a work of reconstruction and questioning of the existing order
through the biblical myth.

Keywords: Contemporary Literature. American Literature. Robert Coover. Biblical
Myths.

This article examines the modes of rewriting of the biblical myth of Noah’s Ark and the Flood in five contemporary texts by Robert Coover, Timothy Findley, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts and Julian Barnes. The aim is to show how the content of the biblical metanarrative is defamiliarized, deconstructed, supplemented and/or displaced, in order to propose an apocryphal counternarrative which challenges the dominant cultural and sexual codes. The five texts thus articulate a resistance to the monological and patriarchal perspective of canonized history, and give voice to a series of marginalised groups whose discrepant narrations have been excluded from official discourse. These heterodox versions also destabilize the common modes of expression, reducing the verbal glow of the biblical ur-text by appropriating colloquial forms and exploiting various forms of humour and extravagance. These contemporary rewritings of the sacred text eventually invite the reader to ponder over the discriminatory and exclusive systems on which the myth of Noah’s Ark and the Flood, but also more broadly the history of the world, are based.

"Le sport est partout. À la télévision, dans les journaux, au stade, au Parlement. Dans le roman aussi. Le sport génère des histoires, des aventures, des tensions, des discours, une certaine idéologie du mérite. Il est un lieu d’affrontement et de contestation, où des valeurs et des enjeux se négocient. Le roman participe à ces débats et les met en scène.

Le baseball est un sport américain. L’idée est entendue, ressassée, mais jamais prise au pied de la lettre. Cet essai étudie la mise en scène de la dimension sociale du baseball dans huit romans des Amériques, pour comprendre de quelle manière il a marqué les cultures où il s’est implanté.

Comment ces romans représentent-ils le baseball? Double jeu retrace la construction discursive de ce sport sur le continent et soutient que le baseball médiatise les tensions spatiales entre les postures de repli sur soi et d’ouverture à l’autre. Lorsqu’ils recyclent les expressions, les formes et les anecdotes de ce jeu, les romanciers, peu importe leur origine, élaborent un corpus commun qui, puisant dans la mémoire du baseball, ses objets et ses ligues, contribue richement à l’histoire continentale.

En revenant par divers angles aux œuvres de Robert Coover, de Don DeLillo, d’Alain Denis, de David Homel, de William Patrick Kinsella, de Leonardo Padura Fuentes, d’Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá et de Philip Roth, Double jeu propose de nouvelles pistes de réflexion sur la signification culturelle du sport. "