Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow

by Raymond Federman

Nineteen critical essays examine the outmodedness of traditional fiction, contemporary experimental fiction in America, France, and Germany, individual innovative authors, and the future of fiction and of literature

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one that sought to deconstruct traditional prose. This type of writing is quite prevalent in his book Double or Nothing, in which the linear narrative of the story has been broken down and restructured so as to be nearly incoherent. Words are also often arranged on pages to resemble images or to suggest repetitious themes.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A valuable selection of essays that represent Federman’s attempts to define various schools of high modernism or postmodernism before the accepted definitions hit the dictionaries (collection circa 1975). The selection is somewhat scattershot—mixing nouveau roman techniques with concrete or avant-pop fictions and such minor figures as Burroughs (sigh!) and Hawkes (double sigh!) in place of more interesting surfiction practitioners, along with a few rather uninspiring lit-theory pieces from the Frenchers. Several essays drum up rare BURIED books for the reading lists. More details below after the

Table of Contents:

Raymond Federman—Surfiction: Four Propositions and an Introduction
John Barth—The Literature of Exhaustion
Ronald Sukenick—The New Tradition in Fiction
Richard Pearce—Enter the Frame
Philippe Sollers—The Novel and the Experience of Limits
Italo Calvino—Myth in the Narrative
Richard Kostelanetz—New Fiction in America
Jean Ricardou—Nouveau Roman, Tel Quel
Robert Pynsent—Contemporary German Fiction: The Dimensions of Experimentation
Jerome Klinkowitz—Literary Disruptions, or What’s Become of American Fiction
Neal Oxenhandler—Listening to Burroughs’s Voice
Marcus Klein—John Hawkes’s Experimental Compositions
Maurice Cagnon and Stephen Smith—J.M.G. Le Clézio: Fiction’s Double Bind
Jacques Ehrmann—The Death of Literature
Jonathan Culler—Towards a Theory of Non-Genre Literature
Jean Ricardou—Writing Between the Lines
Jochen Gerz—Towards a Langauge of Doing
Jean-François Bory—Notes

BURIED American (and one French) experimentals:

Eugene Wildman—Montezuma’s Ball
Jean-François Bory—Once Again
Kenneth Gangemi—Olt
Kenneth Patchen—Journal of Albion Moonlight
G.F. Gravenson—The Sweetmeat Saga
Ed Sanders—Shards of God: A Novel of the Yippies
William Melvin Kelley—Dunfords Travels Everywheres
Madeline Gins—Word Rain
Earl Conrad—Typoo

Authors mentioned in Robert Pynsent’s ‘Contemporary German Fiction: The Dimensions of Experimentation’:

Translated and known:

Peter Weiss
Peter Handke
Thomas Bernhard
Gert Jonke

Rare works in English translation:

Hans Carl Artmann—The Quest for Dr. U, Or, a Solitary Mirror in Which the Day Reflects
Konrad Bayer—The Head of Vitus Bering
Ror Wolf—Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions
Christian Enzensberger—Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt
Michael Scharang—Charlie Tractor and Harry, A Reckoning
Friederike Mayröcker—With Each Clouded Peak

Untranslated:

Hermann Peter Piwitt
Jürgen Becker
Oswald Wiener
Hubert Fichte
Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
Gunter Herburger
Martin Sperr
Uwe Brandner
Wolf Wondratschek
Helmet Heissenbüttel
Franz Mon
Margrit Baur

[Zeynep]

offff içimi şişirdiniz kritikler

[Ekin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bi şey diyim mi bu baya iyiydi bu adama veririm hadi eyw

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of the book refers to the experimental fictions emerging in the late fifties and the sixties both in America and in Europe. Most of the essays were written in the fifties and represent early attempts to describe, define, analyze and interpret the new fiction—the French “nouveau roman,” for instance, as well as the metafictions of Anglo-American writers. Some of the essays are by academics such as Ricardou; others are by writers of fiction, such as Raymond Federman, who also edited the book.

Acquired Sept 19, 2006

[Daniel]

These essays have been gathered in an effort to determine, define, analyze what is the present state of fiction--FICTION NOW--and, to some extent, in an effort to suggest, project, propose what will be the future of fiction---AND TOMORROW.