Understanding Robert Coover

by Brian Evenson

Fiction writer and editor Evenson (creative writing, U. of Denver) analyzes the postmodern metafiction of American writer Coover (b. 1932). After a general chapter, he focuses in turn on early works, The Public Burning, and later works. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2003

About the author

Brian Evenson is an American academic and writer of both literary fiction and popular fiction, some of the latter being published under B. K. Evenson.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Brian Evenson’s Understanding Robert Coover is an excellent instance of a critical exegetical interpretative introductory text. All of Coover’s major works up to and including Lucky Pierre are treated here in detail with a sympathetic hand. It reads easily, clearly and noncondescendingly. And is to be highly recommended for the newbie Cooverite trying to sort out what exactly it is that Coover is up to, as well as for the old=hand Cooverite who would like to revisit the territory and gain a gull’s eye=view. Published in 2003 it does not cover Noir, The Brunist Day of Wrath, Stepmother, or A Child Again.

In the opinion of this metafictionist reader, Coover counts along with John Barth simply as one of the masters of the art of fiction about fiction. While Barth’s metafiction is largely an expression of his deep and undying love of story story story and the writing and reading thereof and the magic thereof, Coover’s metafiction functions more in the tradition of a hermeneutics of suspicion, of demythologization, of Ideologiekritik, unmasking the forces of meaning and myth which bind us, but which simultaneously demand that we reshape and reconstruct the narratives by which we live.

For the more advanced reader of Coover, I cannot fail to recommend highly enough the recent study by Stéphane Vanderhaeghe, Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page.

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

найкраща з критичних книжок про Кувера (so far), чудовий баланс переказу і критики+літературні контексти, розвиток ідей, простий виклад.