Examines the tendency of post-World War II writers to rewrite earlier narratives by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and others.
Does the postmodern process of rewriting stories by earlier writers point to a crisis of originality in our cloning culture? In Rewriting, the first systematic examination of this tendency in late twentieth-century American fiction, Christian Moraru answers this question with a "no" by examining a wide range of representative writers including E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, Trey Ellis, Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, and Bharati Mukherjee, among others. Moraru shows that in reworking the emblematic nineteenth-century short stories and novels of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Alger, Stowe, Thoreau, Twain, and others, postmodern American writers take on-and critically revise-a whole set of values and notions that shape our cultural mythology. Accordingly, Moraru redefines postmodernism in general, and postmodern rewriting in particular, as a culturally innovative and politically enabling phenomenon.
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART I. Rewriting and Postmodernism
1. Rewriting and Late Twentieth-Century Narrative
Cultural Mythology and the Return of Narrative
Classical "Underwriting" to Contemporary "Counterwriting"
A Few Distinctions...
And a Definition: Focus and Terminology
2. Renarrativization, Revision, Critique
Intensities and Extensities
Modus Scribendi: Discourse and Intertextual Politics
Modus Legendi: An Approach to Rewriting
PART II. Rewriting and the National Narrative
1. Romanticism Reincorporated: E.L. Doctorow and the (Re)Production of America
Literary Rags, Historical Tatters
Antinostalgic deja-lu: Performance and Masquerade
Between the (Re)Assembly Lines
Transcendent Surplus, Capital Resurrections
The Immigrating Scripts amd the Staging of America
2. Cold War Fairy Tales: Robert Coover's Social Romance
The "Discourse of America"
Alger's "Wrong Turn": Coover's Personas and Algeresque Impersonations
The Public Burning of the Public Sphere
3. Trascendentalist Rewrites: Paul Auster and the "National Machine"
The Social "Other": Tranpositions and Duplications
The Textual Double: (Re)Visiting Poeland
Ghost(s)Writing
Manhattan Transfers: From Poe to Walden Pond
Unnamable Thoreau
PART III. Rewriting Race: Models of "Cross-Fertilization" in African American Postmodernism
Repetition, Reinscription, and Blck Postmodernism
1. Outwriting: Ishmael Reed's Critical Reappropriations
Master of the Crossroads: Signifyin(g), Rewriting
Improper Appropriations: "Stolentelling" and the Deromancing of Race
Purloining Poe
Dancing to the Typewriter
Necromantic Rewriting: Bonds of Desire
2. Middle Passages: "(Re)Writing Furiously"
"Rewording": Blackness and Literary Agon
Rutherford, the Crivener: Rewriting as Manumission
3. Hip Hop Rewriting: Toward a "Postliberated" Aesthetic
Black Glasnost and "Cross-Pollinating" Reassemblages
The Pleasure of the Hypertext
Co-Authoring
PART IV. Writing Through: Rewriting, Plagiarism, Apocrypha
The Metastases of Originality
1. Avant-Pop Graftings: Mark Leyner's Outrageous Body of Work
(Re)Working Out
"My Books and My Body": Inset, Insert, Textual Surgery
Thrice-Told Tales: Hawthorne, Inc.
"Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown": A "Heinous Revision"
Mutant Narratives: A Typology
2. "Re-Lettering" Hawthorne: Kathy Acker and recriture feminine
Renaming, Language, Piracy
Hester Prynne in High School: Impurifying Puritanism
3. Hester Prynne in India: Bharati Mukjerjee's Postcolonial Letter(s)
Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Rewriting
Apocryphal (Hi)Stories
Epilogue. Rewriting Postmodernism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
