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Raymond Federman Critifiction Postmodern Essays State University of New York Press, 1993 ISBN 0791416798
Raymond Federman, surfictioneer and critifictionist, has assembled into one volume his twenty-five year engagement with the postmodern and the seemingly unbounded play of its practitioners. He presents here eight essays: four reprinted (dare we say quoted?) from their earlier incarnations in the 1970s and 1980s, and four printed for the first time. Even as they play, these essays offer a postmortem on the postmodern. In a telling moment reported in one of the essays, Federman receives a letter written to him on the occasion of Samuel Beckett's death: "Sam has now changed tense." On the strength of these essays, we might say that postmodernism, too, has changed tense. The subtitle to this volume might easily have been: who killed postmodernism, when was it killed, and did anybody mourn its passing? Or, is postmodernism really dead, given the host of quotations, repetitions, textual games, and other self-reflexive gestures in Federman's essays, both old and new?
In his 1978 essay, "Fiction Today or the Pursuit of Non-knowledge", Federman traces mimesis through the nineteenth century, through its expressive mode in the romantics and its representative mode in the realists, before skipping, conveniently, to the 1950s, thereby ignoring the moderns, and landing squarely on the postmoderns. In light of the bankruptcy of mimesis, representation, flawed expression, and a crisis of language (or, in the words of John Barth-the exhaustion of possibilities), Federman asks, "How can the writer confront...