Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Key to Abbreviations
- Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction
- Introduction
- 1 A Disruption of Sensibility
- 2 The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction
- 3 Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science
- 4 John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope
- Conclusion: “Subjective Historicism”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- PERMISSIONS
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Key to Abbreviations
- Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction
- Introduction
- 1 A Disruption of Sensibility
- 2 The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction
- 3 Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science
- 4 John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope
- Conclusion: “Subjective Historicism”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- PERMISSIONS
Summary
After all, history is never literal. If it were, it would have no pattern at all, we'd all be lost.
–Richard Nixon in The Public Burning (1977)At one point in The Public Burning, Robert Coover's “Historical Romance, ” a man exits from a theater into the Times Square area where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are to be executed. He takes in the scene before him. “People are carrying signs that his right eye tells him read save the rosenbergs! and heil eisenhower!, his left bomb china now! and ethel rosenberg bewitched my baby! He is no longer surprised by these ocular reversals, in fact he is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth” (356). If he is, he has more cause to panic than he knows – the reason he sees things as he does is because he has neglected to remove his 3-D glasses upon leaving the movie. If what he sees through those lenses passes for sanity, how much more insane must the unrefracted world be.
Most authors today would find Coover's scene a paradigmatic expression of what contemporary life is like. Most also would find Coover's scene paradigmatic of what contemporary American life is like, the double vision of its unnamed man an apt representation of a country whose schizophrenia finally has come to the surface. It is when critics evaluate such scenes that problems arise. Some contend that an environment of disorder invalidates any order proposed in art.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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