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   Book Info

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Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction  
Author: Richard Walsh
ISBN: 0521471451
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review


Book Description
Novel Arguments deals with American innovative (postmodern, metafictional, experimental) fiction since the sixties. It advances a concept of the "argument" of fiction to correct criticism's too purely formal interest in innovation. The book closely examines the readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker and shows how they achieve an effective articulation of their concerns by virtue of their innovation, which is aimed at a making new of fictional cognition.




Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Novel arguments argues that innovative fiction - by which is meant writing that has been variously labeled postmodern, metafictional, experimental - extends our ways of thinking about the world, and rejects the critical consensus that, under the rubrics of postmodernism and metafiction, homogenizes this fiction as autonomous and self-absorbed. Play, self-consciousness, and immanence - supposed symptoms of innovative fiction's autonomy - are here reconsidered as integral to its means of engagement. The book advances a concept of the "argument" of fiction as a construct wedding structure and content into a highly evolved and expressive experimental form. Close readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker show how they articulate matters of substance, social engagement, and ideological currency by virtue of the act of innovation. Walsh deftly argues for a new understanding of fictional cognition at the theoretical level, and, in an act of great critical creativity, discards altogether the flattening totalities of received postmodern formulations.

     



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