Marc Chénetier

Professor Jerome Klinkowitz

This volume demonstrates an awareness of contemporary American literature on the part of 13 European critics, and is organized in two parts. The first part, "Wide Angles," explores the methodology and the problems posed by the study of innovative texts. The essayists--French, Italian, German, Belgian, and British critics--offer perspectives on modernism and postmodernism, author-reader relations in narrative, narrative themes and strategies, and poetry and drama. The second part, "Applied Cinometrics," deals with particular authors and their works. Subjects discussed include: Walker Percy; the novels of William Gaddis and John Sorrentino; a comparative study of Nabokov and Balthus; Raymond Carver; David Mamet; Donald Barthelme; and Sam Shepard. ISBN 0-8093-1216-6: $21.95.

European Views of Contemporary American Literature

Critical Angles

Korte studie over het werk van de Amerikaanse schrijver (geb. 1935)

Richard Brautigan

Few contemporary American writers have been subjected to as much laudatory abuse as Richard Brautigan who, having become famous in the 1960s, was made a cult figure for the hippy generation and was systematically refused recognition as a major novelist once the sentimental wave of the ‘greening of America’ had passed. Marc Chénetier’s study, originally published in 1983, was the first book to attempt to assess Brautigan’s writing art which, far from weakening over the years, had become, amid critical indifference, more secure in its techniques, more all-encompassing in its strategy and more iconoclastic in its goals. In analysing most of Brautigan’s fictional works in the light of his poetics, it examines the mechanisms of his metafictional and deconstructive offensive and indicates the direction in which Brautigan was moving at the time.

Marc Chénetier

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