Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Paul Auster (2004) (263p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Paul Auster (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editor: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 254 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Publications; Library Binding edition (January 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791076628
ISBN-13: 978-0791076620

Description:
Poet and novelist, essayist and screenwriter, contemporary author Paul Auster's prolific oeuvre includes the critically acclaimed screenplay for "Smoke as well as the novel "Timbuktu.

Editor’s Note
My Introduction meditates upon The New York Trilogy, three distinguished short novels that both puzzle and charm me by their artful evasions.
The Austerian fear of identity loss is noted by Charles Baxter, while Stephen Fredman considers the image of (Jewish) memory in Auster’s almost Kafkan sense of confinement.
Pascal Bruckner discusses Auster’s stance towards his actual father, unknowable by his son, presumably in contrast to the literary fathers, Kafka and Beckett, after which William Dow adds another commentary upon The Invention of Solitude.
The New York Trilogy is a challenge to fashionable literary theory, according to John Zilcosky, who palpably is accurate, but now that it is 2003, the era of the Death of Theory, one can prophesy that Auster’s challenge may help put the Trilogy into the Limbo of Period Pieces.
William Lavender also studies City of Glass as a conflict with French literary theory, while Alison Russell speculates upon the problematic element in Auster’s “anti-detective fiction.”
Chance, a crucial aspect of Auster’s narratives, is the concern of Steven E. Alford, after which Tim Woods examines the ambiguous urbanity of In the Country of Last Things.
Padgett Powell is not persuaded by that novel, while Katharine Washburn commends it for “Swiftean guile and ferocity.”
Moon Palace by Steven Weisenberger is juxtaposed both with Whitman and Emerson, after which Bruce Bawer relates this novel to The New York Trilogy as another interplay upon Doubles, like Poe’s “William Wilson.”
Aliki Varvogli, writing upon Auster’s Leviathan, invokes the American context of the Age of Emerson, while Linda L. Fleck subjects the same book to the critical stances of Paul de Man and Frederic Jameson. Lastly, Steven G. Kellman ponders Timbuktu, Auster’s canine narrative.