Postmodern Film and Fiction Intermediating: Texture, Spectacle, Theatricality, and Violence in Robert Coover’s Texts

Year 2022, Issue: 57, 5 - 26, 14.06.2023

Lovorka Gruić Grmuša Grmuša

Abstract

This study recognizes reciprocal interplay of cinematography
and literature, which constitute one another in a dynamic process of
remediation, while highlighting intermedial reflexivity from screen to
paper and how its “cinematic,” multifaceted dimensions of imagery,
art, movement, technology, and industry interact with paper-based
writings of Robert Coover. Embracing the techniques and forms of
screen technologies, as well as exposing their ideological constructions
and stereotypes, Coover’s texts reveal filmlike texture, spectacle,
theatricality, and violence, disclosing the disintegration of the confines
in-between media, as well as relative non-distinction of the frontier
between the real and the mediated, where virtuality imposes as a
cultural force and dominates actuality. The study is informed by Paul
Virilio’s, Jean Baudrillard’s, and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts on how
media and image-manipulation imprison the viewers through means of
identification, and how cinematography contributes to the genesis of a
new notion of reality.

Keywords

American Studies, American Film, Film Studies

References

• Amerika, Mark. Remixthebook. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• Bass, Thomas A. “An Encounter with Robert Coover.” The Antioch Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 1982, pp. 287–302. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/4611123. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021.
• Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 1988. ---. Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, Stanford UP, 1988.
• ---. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Shella Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1995.
• Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle Andison, Philosophical Library, 1946.
• Bolter, Jay David, and David Gruisin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT, 1999.
• Burn, Stephen. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. Continuum, 2008.
• Coover, Robert. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut. Grove, 2002.
• ---. Gerald’s Party. Grove, 1985.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• ---. Ghost Town: A Novel. 1998. Grove, 2000.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• ---. A Night at the Movies Or, You Must Remember This. Linden, 1987.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• ---. Pricksongs & Descants. 1969. Grove, 2000.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• ---. The Public Burning. Viking/Richard Seaver, 1977.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• ---. Spanking the Maid. Grove, 1982.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia UP, 1994.
• ---. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
• ---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
• Double Impact. Directed by Sheldon Lettich, Columbia Pictures, 1991. Evenson, Brian. Understanding Robert Coover. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
• Fight Club. Directed by David Fincher, 20th Century Fox, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
• Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1995.
• Gallo, Louis. “Nixon and the House of Wax: An Emblematic Episode in Coover’s The Public Burning.” Critique, vol. 23, no. 3, 1982, pp. 43- 51.
• Gruic Grmusa, Lovorka and Kiene Brillenburg Wurth. “Cinematography as a Literary Concept in the (Post)Modern Age: Pirandello to Pynchon.” Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace, edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Fordham UP, 2012, pp. 184-200.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. “Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision.” Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace, edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Fordham UP, 2012. pp. 101-26.
• ---. Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia UP, 2021.
• ---. “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves.” American Literature, vol. 74, no. 4, 2002, pp. 779-806.
• Hite, Molly. “‘A Parody of Martyrdom’: The Rosenbergs, Cold War Theology, and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 85-101. https://doi. org/10.2307/1345982. Accessed 21 Nov. 2021.
• Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Rodopi, 2005. Hyde, Dominic. Vagueness, Logic and Ontology. Routledge, 2008. Johnston, John. “Machinic Vision.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 1, 1999, pp. 27-48.
• ---. “Post-Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo.” New Orleans Review, vol. 17, no. 2, 1990, pp. 90- 97.
• Lash, Scott. “Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a ‘Regime of Signification.’” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 5, no. 2-3, 1988, pp. 311-36.
• McCaffrey, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.
• McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987.
• ---. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992.
• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, 2006.
• Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. University of Missouri Press, 1987.
• Morley, David. “Postmodernism: The rough guide.” Cultural Studies and Communications, edited by James Curran, et al. Arnold, 1996, pp. 50–65.
• Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stenley Elkin, Philip Roth. Birkhäuser Verlag. 1994.
• The Punisher. Directed by Mark Goldblatt, New World Pictures, 1989. Randel, Don Michael. The Harvard Dictionary of Music. 4th ed., The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003.
• Solomon, Stanley. “Aristotle in Twilight: American Film Narrative in the 1980s.” The Cinematic Text, edited by R. Barton Palmer, AMS, 1989, pp. 63-80.
• Star Wars. Directed by George Lucas, 20th Century Fox, 1977. Vanderhaeghe, Stephane. “Robert Coover, Or the Adventures of the Novel in the Age of Digital Production.” Science and American Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From Henry Adams to John Adams, edited by Claire Maniez, et al., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 159-75.
• Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Translated by Phillip Beitchman. Semiotext(e), 1991.
• ---. The Information Bomb. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 2000.
• ---. The Lost Dimension. Translated by Daniel Moshenberg, Semiotext(e), 1991.
• ---. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose, British Film Institute, 1994.
• Walsh, Richard. “Narrative Inscription, History, and the Reader in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 25, no. 3, 1993, pp. 332–46, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532957. Accessed 10 Oct. 2021.
• Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. Fordham UP, 2004. Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. Oxford UP, 1993.
• Winokur, Mark. “The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace.” CTHEORY. 2003. journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ ctheory/article/view/14563/5410 Accessed 6 Sep. 2021. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge UP, 1989.