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Slethaug (English, U. of Waterloo) traces the reemergence of the doppelg<:;a>nger in recent American fiction, particularly stalking the novels of Nabokov, Pynchon, Brautigan, and Barth. But this time it does not signify the unity of conflicting elements, as in its previous appearances in western literature, but celebrates a discontinuous self in a fragmented universe. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

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With the assistance of poststructuralist theories by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction evaluates the contemporary role of the doppelganger. The doppelganger or double has been used in Plato's works to explain sexual attraction; in Western folklore to signify imminent death; in premodern English literature to explore the relationship of the soul and the body, reason and conscience, or any number of binary oppositions; and in twentieth-century literature to depict the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. Traditionally the double has affirmed rational humanist views of an indivisible, fixed identity and universal absolutes. Gordon E. Slethaug argues that in postmodern literature the double has ceased to function as a metaphor for unity (or aberrational metaphysical-physical conflict and psychological decomposition) and instead celebrates a discontinuous self in a fragmented universe. A self-conscious literary device, it now assesses the human desire to structure language, fiction, and all reality. By specifically applying his theory to works by Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes, John Barth, Richard Brautigan, and Raymond Federman, Slethaug gears The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction to fictional works that depart from the psychological perspectives of Freudian psychoanalysis or Jungian archetypalism, thus setting his work apart from earlier studies of the double. The authors Slethaug examines are concerned with the de-formation and re-formation of signifying structures in society and fiction: In Despair, Nabokov shows how the doppelganger has linked analogy, metaphor, philosophical idealism, and transcendental mysticism. In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon interrogates binarity, putting it under erasure, and affirms binary intersubjectivity; he also looks at the human tendency to equate systems. In Blood Oranges, Hawkes investigates the way in which the twin drives of e

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