Paul Auster, New York Trilogy

Adriana-Cecilia Neagu (Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1987

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Metafiction
Novel

Resources

The Intellectual Context

For all its declared interest in entertaining, postmodern fiction has not always been the seductive, fun-filled place to visit anticipated by the enthusiastic Robert Scholes in his now classical study, The Fabulators (1967), written in the then early days of postmodern experimentation. In his programmatic essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, published in the same year of 1967, John Barth argued it was not so much that the contemporary writer had run out of plots, rather, humbled by the monumental scale of Joyce's achievement, whatever creativity remained available for the contemporary novelist was impeded by the demand of being “technically up-to-date”. However, decades of …

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3962 words

Citation: Neagu, Adriana-Cecilia. "New York Trilogy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 August 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3273, accessed 24 April 2024.]

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