Word: coover
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PROBABLY fair to say that the Novel came out of the sixties less dead than it came in. For the most part, that was thanks to the experimentation of people like Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover who were busy providing a set of new literary forms aching for new literary content. And now, just in the past year or so, two novels have appeared that make glimmer the hope that the old Genre might be back on her feet before long. Gravity's Rainbow, when it is working, is one of these, Updike's Rabbit...
...Weed Factor ushered in a new vein of American fiction in the early and middle sixties including Pynchon's V. Heller's Catch-22, and Coover's The Origin of the Brunists. What these works all share is an abiding contempt for the boundaries of traditional realism and traditional notions of seriousness. The example of the early moderns, Joyce in particular, had been terrifying. In a novel like Ulysses, the most incidental details were somehow necessary. Instead of trying to compete on these terms, the novelists of the sixties rejected such lofty ambitions and produced fiction where everything was superfluous...
...Michael Levenson's critical essay treats the experimental work of three contemporary authors in a very experimental way. "The Short Fiction of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover" is a subject few critics would take on without assurance of enough room for extensive textual justification and a good deal of hedging; Levenson's short essay on the "self-vivisection" of these three writers in search of a sensibility uses brief quotations to launch his fast-paced, nine-part analysis. The spirit of the essay is apt, but the dialectic Levenson sets up between the styles of this new fiction...