Rewriting : Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning

by Moraru, Christian

• ISBN13: 9780791451076
• ISBN10: 0791451070
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Author Biography

Christian Moraru is Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xvii
PART I Rewriting and Postmodernism
Rewriting and Late Twentieth-Century Narrative	3	(20)
Cultural Mythology and the Return of Narrative	3	(3)
Classical ``Underwriting'' to Contemporary ``Counterwriting''	6	(4)
A Few Distinctions...	10	(9)
And a Definition: Focus and Terminology	19	(4)
Renarrativization, Revision, Critique	23	(18)
Intensities and Extensities	23	(4)
Modus Scribendi: Discourse and Intertextual Politics	27	(5)
Modus Legendi: An Approach to Rewriting	32	(9)
PART II Rewriting and the National Narrative
Romanticism Reincorporated: E. L. Doctorow and the (Re)Production of America	41	(14)
Literary Rags, Historical Tatters	41	(2)
Antinostalgic deja-lu: Performance and Masquerade	43	(3)
Between the (Re)Assembly Lines	46	(4)
Transcendent Surplus, Capital Resurrections	50	(1)
The Immigrating Scripts and the Staging of America	51	(4)
Cold War Fairy Tales: Robert Coover's Social Romance	55	(12)
The ``Discourse of America''	56	(3)
Alger's ``Wrong Turn'': Coover's Personas and Algeresque Impersonations	59	(5)
The Public Burning of the Public Sphere	64	(3)
Transcendentalist Rewrites: Paul Auster and the ``National Machine''	67	(20)
The Social ``Other'': Transpositions and Duplications	67	(2)
The Textual Double: (Re)Visiting Poeland	69	(5)
Ghost(s)Writing	74	(3)
Manhattan Transfers: From Poe to Walden Pond	77	(3)
Unnamable Thoreau	80	(3)
PART III Rewriting Race: Models of ``Cross-Fertilization'' in African American Postmodernism
Repetition, Reinscription, and Black Postmodernism	83	(4)
Outwriting: Ishmael Reed's Critical Reappropriations	87	(16)
Master of the Crossroads: Signifying(g), Rewriting	87	(2)
Improper Appropriations: ``Stolentelling'' and the Deromancing of Race	89	(4)
Purloining Poe	93	(4)
Dancing to the Typewriter	97	(1)
Necromantic Rewriting: Bonds of Desire	98	(5)
Middle Passages: ``(Re)Writing Furiously''	103	(10)
``Rewording'': Blackness and Literary Agon	103	(3)
Rutherford, the Scrivener: Rewriting as Manumission	106	(7)
Hip-Hop Rewriting: Toward a ``Postliberated'' Aesthetic	113	(16)
Black Glasnost and ``Cross-Pollinating'' Reassemblages	113	(4)
The Pleasure of the Hypertext	117	(6)
Co-Authoring	123	(4)
PART IV Writing Through: Rewriting, Plagiarism, Apocrypha
The Metastases of Originality	127	(2)
Avant-Pop Graftings: Mark Leyner's Outrageous Body of Work	129	(14)
(Re)Working Out	129	(2)
``My Books and My Body'': Inset, Insert, Textual Surgery	131	(2)
Thrice-Told Tales: Hawthorne, Inc.	133	(2)
``Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown'': A ``Heinous Revision''	135	(6)
Mutant Narratives: A Typology	141	(2)
``Re-Lettering'' Hawthorne: Kathy Acker and recriture feminine	143	(12)
Renaming, Language, Piracy	145	(2)
Hester Prynne in High School: Impurifying Puritanism	147	(8)
Hester Prynne in India: Bharati Mukherjee's Postcolonial Letter(s)	155	(12)
Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Rewriting	155	(3)
Apocryphal (Hi)Stories	158	(9)
Epilogue. Rewriting Postmodernism	167	(8)
Notes	175	(12)
Bibliography	187	(18)
Index	205