First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Study Guide for Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

A comprehensive examination of the fiction and poetry of Raymond Carver.

"Readers have been aware of Raymond Carver's preoccupation with voyeurism and the visual for decades. Ayala Amir expands our knowledge of these issues by examining the links between the visual in fiction and related fields such as photography and cinema, opening up a whole new, interdisciplinary dimension to Carver's work. The Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver is a very welcome contribution to our understanding of Carver's stories."-Sandra Lee Kleppe, International Raymond Carver Society --

Best known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fiction writer. Sandra Lee Kleppe combines comparative analysis with an in-depth examination of Carver’s poems, making a case for the quality of Carver’s poetic output and showing the central role Carver’s pursuit of poetry played in his career as a writer. Carver constructed his own organic literary system of 'autopoetics,' a concept connected to a paradigm shift in our understanding of the inter-relatedness of biological and cultural systems. This idea is seen as informing Carver’s entire production, and a distinguishing feature of Kleppe’s book is its contextualization of Carver’s poetry within the complex literary and scientific systems that influenced his development as a writer. Kleppe addresses the common themes and intertextual links between Carver’s poetry and short story careers, situates Carver’s poetry within the love poem tradition, explores the connections between neurology and poetic memories, and examines Carver’s use of the elegy genre within the context of his terminal illness. Tellingly, Carver’s poetry, which has aroused slight interest among literary scholars, is frequently taught to medical students. This testimony to the interdisciplinary implications of Carver’s work suggests the appropriateness of Kleppe’s culminating discussion of Carver’s work as a bridge between the fields of literature and medicine.

This first book-length study on the black humor in Raymond Carver's work includes valuable interpretations of Carver's aesthetics as well as the psycho-social implications of his short fiction. The presence of an indeterminate «menace» in the oppressive situations of black humor in Carver - as compared to a European tradition of existentialist writing and his American predecessors including Twain, Heller, Barth and others - is mitigated through humor so it is not dominant. As a result, a subtle promise emerges in the characters' lives.

Hailed as the “American Chekhov” by the Times Literary Supplement, Raymond Carver is the most popular and influential American short-story writer since Ernest Hemingway. His works have been adapted to film and translated into more than twenty languages. Yet despite this international appeal, the critical attention to his writing has originated mostly in the US. In an attempt to expand the scope and range of Carver criticism, Not Far From Here: The Paris Symposium on Raymond Carver – based on papers delivered at the International Conference of the Raymond Carver Society at the University of Paris XII on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the author’s death – offers an engaging conversation by both emerging and established international scholars from France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the US. Literary studies, biographical studies, film theory, textual editing, intertextual analysis, cultural studies, feminism, semiotics, mythology, existentialism, metafictional analysis, representationalism, symbolism, humanism, and Lacanian criticism all have some presence in this collection of essays. Not Far From Here provides readers and scholars alike with new and multinational insights into Carver’s poetry and fiction.

A Companion to the American Short Story traces thedevelopment of this versatile literary genre over the past 200years. Sets the short story in context, paying attention to theinteraction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles Contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon,with close attention to the achievements of women writers as wellas such important genres as the ghost story and detectivefiction Embraces diverse traditions including African-American,Jewish-American, Latino, Native-American, and regional short storywriting Includes a section focused on specific authors and texts, fromEdgar Allen Poe to John Updike

CHARLES BUKOWSKI & RAYMOND CARVER Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver were credited as the fathers of the "Dirty Realism" genre in the 1980s--branching out from minimalism, the stripping of fiction down to the least amount of words and a concentration on the subject's view of the object. The characters are usually run-of-the-mill, every day people--the lower and middle class worker, the unemployed, the alcoholic, the beaten-down-by-life. In this experimental monograph (in the vein of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Contemporary American Fiction), avante/pop literary critic Michael Hemmingson examines these dirty works of Bukowski and Carver through the lens of late twentieth-century American culture and the sociological observation of the self, questioning the authority of the "I" in fiction and poetry and its relation to the eye's gaze of the words on a page. Hemmingson offers close readings of selected texts, deconstructing iconic works by Bukowski and Carver to point out the elements of dirty realism and mastery of the language of the common folk, proving that these two writers are an institution in American literature. MICHAEL HEMMINGSON has written over 25 books of literary, western, SF, horror, noir, autobiography, erotica, narrative journalism, gonzo journalism, cultural anthropology, critical theory, critifiction, and ethnography. He lives and works in Southern California.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, http: //www.uni-jena.de/ (Institute for English/ Amererican Studies), course: Hauptseminar, 21 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In the seemingly simple low-rent tragedy "Collectors", Carver's most minimalistic story, a salesman for vacuum cleaners enters the house and life of the I-narrator. A multitude of blanks and, moreover, unfamiliar events and actions contribute to a large extend to the high potential of anxiety of the story. In the following, I will first reveal the most significant blanks concerning the setting, the point of view and the two protagonists. By doing so, I will also attempt to fill them. Secondly, I will analyze what is unfamiliar in the story and how events and actions of the two characters amplify the, on the whole, uncanny situation. Finally, I will sum up the main findings of my analysis and evaluate them