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.

Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federman’s creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet.

Postmodern Studies deals with (any aspect of) postmodernism, or of postmodernity and the postmodern in relation to literature.

Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with “The First Splendor” by Leopold Buczkowski and ending with “The Suspected Dybbuk” by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: “Tworki” by Marek Bieńczyk and “Fly Trap Factory” by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish postmodernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.

The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s "revolution of the word" in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines through the work of more than fifty writers up to the present, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, B. S. Johnson, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Georges Perec, Kathy Acker, Iain Sinclair, Hélène Cixous, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five writing strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologising the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.

This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term “Surfiction” for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.

In The Hawkline Monster, Brautigan's minimalist metafictive parody of the double depicts our narcissistic view of reality. In Double or Nothing, Federman subverts the conventional double, exposing its gamelike structures and traditional views of life and text.