Jeffrey R. Di Leo 
Federman’s Fictions 
Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust

This collection of essays offers an authoritative examination and appraisal of the French-American novelist Raymond Federman’s many contributions to humanities scholarship, including Holocaust studies, Beckett studies, translation studies, experimental fiction, postmodernism, and autobiography. Although known primarily as a novelist, Federman (1928–2009) is also the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. After emigrating to the United States in 1942 and receiving a Ph.D. in comparative literature at UCLA in 1957, he held professorships in the University at Buffalo’s departments of French and English from 1964 to 1999. Together with Steve Katz and Ronald Sukenick, he was one of the original founders of the Fiction Collective, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to avant garde, experimental prose. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers who pioneered ‘metafictional’ or ‘postmodern’ American literature. Federman’s Fiction will introduce (or, for some, reintroduce) to the broader scholarly community a creative and daring thinker whose work is significant not just to considerations of the development of innovative fiction, but to a number of other distinct disciplines and emerging critical discourses.

Table of Content

Preface

Some Answers for Raymond Federman


Charles Bernstein



Acknowledgments

Introduction

Other Voices: The Fiction of Raymond Federman


Jeffrey R. Di Leo




Part I. A Life in the Text



1. Beckett and Beyond: Federman the Scholar


Jerome Klinkowitz



2. How, and How Not, to Be a Published Novelist: The Case of Raymond Federman


Ted Pelton



3. Samuel Beckett and Raymond Federman: A Bilingual Companionship


Daniela Hurezanu



4. Filling in the Blanks: Raymond Federman, Self-Translator


Alyson Waters



5. Re-Double or Nothing: Federman, Autobiography, and Creative Literary Criticism


Larry Mc Caffery




Part II. Philosophy of Literature



6. A Narrative Poetics of Raymond Federman


Brian Mc Hale



7. Surfiction, Not Sure Fiction: Raymond Federman’s Second-Degree Textual Manipulations


Davis Schneiderman



8. Raymond Federman, the Ultimate Metafictioneer


Eckhard Gerdes



9. Formulating Yet Another Paradox: Raymond Federman’s Real Fictitious Discourses


Thomas Hartl



10. The Agony of Unrecognition: Raymond Federman and Postmodern Theory


Eric Dean Rasmussen



11. Raymond Federman and Critical Theory


Jan Baetens




Part III. Laughter, History, and the Holocaust



12. Surviving in the Corridors of History or, History as Double or Nothing


Dan Stone



13. When Postmodern Play Meets Survivor Testimony: Federman and Holocaust Literature


Susan Rubin Suleiman



14. “In Black Inkblood”: Agonistic and Cooperative Authorship in the (Re)Writing of History


Marcel Cornis-Pope



15. Cosmobabble or, Federman’s Return


Christian Moraru



16. Featherman’s Body Literature or, the Unbearable Lightness of Being


Michael Wutz



17. Federman’s Laughterature


Menachem Feuer



Afterword

Critifictional Reflections on the Novel Today


Raymond Federman



About the Contributors

Index

About the author

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is also editor and publisher of the
American Book Review and editor-in-chief of
symplokē, a journal of comparative literature and theory. His books include
Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (coedited with R. M. Berry), also published by SUNY Press.