Novel As Performance: The Fiction of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman (Crosscurrents/Modern/Critiques. Third Series)

By Jerzy Kutnik

This first full-length study of leading con­temporary writers Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman defines the differ­ence between modern and postmodern writers as the distinction between mime­tic and performance art.

Larry McCaffery notes that "Kutnik's thesis is that performance art engages the artist and the audience in a process whose function is fundamentally differ­ent from the mimetic tradition... that is, rather than aiming at representing some preexisting state of affairs, perfor­mance art seeks to be an experience for its own sake, an experience which is ultimately to be recognized as continu­ous with reality and not merely an occa­sion for interpretation and analysis."

Postmodernists such as Sukenick and Federman spotlight themselves in the act of writing. Thus their creations have a life of their own, and the act of writing is so much a part of that life that the process of creation is as important as the end product. Kutnik's metaphor for this proc­ess is performance art.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809312492
• ISBN13: 9780809312498
• Release Date: July 1986
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.5"