Rewriting : postmodern narrative and cultural critique in the age of cloning

Author(s)

    • Moraru, Christian

Bibliographic Information

Rewriting : postmodern narrative and cultural critique in the age of cloning

Christian Moraru

(SUNY series in postmodern culture / Joseph Natoli, editor)

State University of New York, c2001

  • : pbk.

Available at  / 9 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-204) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Does the postmodern process of rewriting stories by earlier writers point to a crisis of originality in our cloning culture? In Rewriting, the first systematic examination of this tendency in late twentieth-century American fiction, Christian Moraru answers this question with a "no" by examining a wide range of representative writers including E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, Trey Ellis, Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, and Bharati Mukherjee, among others. Moraru shows that in reworking the emblematic nineteenth-century short stories and novels of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Alger, Stowe, Thoreau, Twain, and others, postmodern American writers take on—and critically revise—a whole set of values and notions that shape our cultural mythology. Accordingly, Moraru redefines postmodernism in general, and postmodern rewriting in particular, as a culturally innovative and politically enabling phenomenon.

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments PART I. Rewriting and Postmodernism 1. Rewriting and Late Twentieth-Century Narrative Cultural Mythology and the Return of Narrative Classical "Underwriting" to Contemporary "Counterwriting" A Few Distinctions . . . And a Definition: Focus and Terminology 2. Renarrativization, Revision, Critique Intensities and Extensities Modus Scribendi: Discourse and Intertextual Politics Modus Legendi: An Approach to Rewriting PART II. Rewriting and the National Narrative 1. Romanticism Reincorporated: E.L. Doctorow and the (Re)Production of America Literary Rags, Historical Tatters Antinostalgic deja-lu: Performance and Masquerade Between the (Re)Assembly Lines Transcendent Surplus, Capital Resurrections The Immigrating Scripts amd the Staging of America 2. Cold War Fairy Tales: Robert Coover's Social Romance The "Discourse of America" Alger's "Wrong Turn": Coover's Personas and Algeresque Impersonations The Public Burning of the Public Sphere 3. Trascendentalist Rewrites: Paul Auster and the "National Machine" The Social "Other": Tranpositions and Duplications The Textual Double: (Re)Visiting Poeland Ghost(s)Writing Manhattan Transfers: From Poe to Walden Pond Unnamable Thoreau PART III. Rewriting Race: Models of "Cross-Fertilization" in African American Postmodernism Repetition, Reinscription, and Blck Postmodernism 1. Outwriting: Ishmael Reed's Critical Reappropriations Master of the Crossroads: Signifyin(g), Rewriting Improper Appropriations: "Stolentelling" and the Deromancing of Race Purloining Poe Dancing to the Typewriter Necromantic Rewriting: Bonds of Desire 2. Middle Passages: "(Re)Writing Furiously" "Rewording": Blackness and Literary Agon Rutherford, the Crivener: Rewriting as Manumission 3. Hip Hop Rewriting: Toward a "Postliberated" Aesthetic Black Glasnost and "Cross-Pollinating" Reassemblages The Pleasure of the Hypertext Co-Authoring PART IV. Writing Through: Rewriting, Plagiarism, Apocrypha The Metastases of Originality 1. Avant-Pop Graftings: Mark Leyner's Outrageous Body of Work (Re)Working Out "My Books and My Body": Inset, Insert, Textual Surgery Thrice-Told Tales: Hawthorne, Inc. "Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown": A "Heinous Revision" Mutant Narratives: A Typology 2. "Re-Lettering" Hawthorne: Kathy Acker and recriture feminine Renaming, Language, Piracy Hester Prynne in High School: Impurifying Puritanism 3. Hester Prynne in India: Bharati Mukjerjee's Postcolonial Letter(s) Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Rewriting Apocryphal (Hi)Stories Epilogue. Rewriting Postmodernism Notes Bibliography Index

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