Paul Auster published his first prose work, the autobiographical The Invention of Solitude, in 1982; since then his fiction has gained ever growing popular and critical acclaim. This book is a stimulating pioneering study of eight works that make up the Auster canon: The Invention of Solitude, the three novellas that comprise The New York Trilogy, and the novels In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan. Focusing on the quest - which she sees as the master narrative of all of Auster's novels - Shiloh examines Auster's writing in a multi-layered context of literary and philosophical paradigms relevant to his practice, such as the American tradition of the «open road, » the generic conventions of detective fiction, postmodernist concepts of the subject, Sartre's and Camus's existentialist theories, and Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalytic models, all of which offer enriching and insightful perspectives on Auster's poetics.

Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.

This book focuses upon the literary and autobiographical writings of American novelist Paul Auster, investigating his literary postmodernity in relation to a full range of his writings. Martin addresses Auster’s evocation of a range of postmodern notions, such as the duplicitous art of self-invention, the role of chance and contingency, authorial authenticity and accountability, urban dislocation, and the predominance of duality.

Paul Auster is one of the most acclaimed figures in American literature. Known primarily as a novelist, Auster's films and various collaborations are now gaining more recognition. Evija Trofimova offers a radically different approach to the author's wider body of work, unpacking the fascinating web of relationships between his texts and presenting Auster's canon as a rhizomatic facto-fictional network produced by a set of writing tools. Exploring Auster's literal and figurative use of these tools – the typewriter, the cigarette, the doppelgänger figure, the city – Evija Trofimova discovers Auster's “writing machine”, a device that works both as a means to write and as a construct that manifests the emblematic writer-figure. This is a book about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them, and the ways such machines invest them with meaning. Embarking on a scholarly quest that takes her from between the lines of Auster's work to between the streets of his beloved New York and finally to the man himself, Paul Auster's Writing Machine becomes not just a critical investigation but a critical collaboration, raising important questions about the ultimate meaning of Auster's work, and about the relationship between texts, their authors, their readers and their critics.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, published in one volume for the first time in England in 1988 and in the U.S. in 1990 has been widely categorised as detective fiction among literary scholars and critics. There is, however, a striking diversity and lack of consensus regarding the classification of the trilogy within the existing genre forms of the detective novel. Among others, Auster's stories are described as: metaanti-detective-fiction; mysteries about mysteries; a strangely humorous working of the detective novel; very soft-boiled; a metamystery; glassy little jigsaws; a mixture between the detective story and the nouveau roman; a metaphysical detective story; a deconstruction of the detective novel; antidetective-fiction; a late example of the anti-detective genre; and being related to 'hard-boiled' novels by authors like Hammett and Chandler. Such a striking lack of agreement within the secondary literature has inspired me to write this paper. It does not, however, elaborate further an this diversity of viewpoints although they all seem to have a certain validity and underline the richness and diversity of Auster's detective trilogy; neither do I intend to coin a new term for Auster's detective fiction. I would rather place The New York Trilogy within a more general and open literary form, namely postmodern detective fiction. This classifies Paul Auster as an American writer who is part of the generation that immediately followed the 'classical literary movement' of American postmodernism' of the 60s and 70s. His writing demonstrates that he has been influenced by the revolutionary and innovative postmodern concepts, characterised by the notion of 'anything goes an a planet of multiplicity' as well as by French poststructuralism. He may, however, be distinguished from a 'traditional' postmodern writer through a certain coherence in the narrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and by showing a certain responsibility for social and moral aspects going beyond mere metafictional and subversive elements. Many of the ideas of postmodernism were formulated in theoretical literary texts of the 60s and 70s and based an formal experiments include the attempt of subverting the ability of language to refer truthfully to the world, and a radical turning away from coherent narrative discourse and plot. These ideas seem to have been intemalized by the new generation of postmodern writers of the 80s to such [...]

The early works of Paul Auster convey the loneliness of the individual fully committed to the work of writing, as if he were confined within the book that dominates his life. All through Auster’s poetry, essays and fiction, the work of writing is an actual physical effort, an effective construction, as if the words aligned in the poem-text were stones to place in a row when building a wall or some other structure in stone. This book studies the symbolism of the genetic substance of the world (re)built through the work of writing, inside the walls of the room, closed in space and time, though open to an unlimited mental expansion. Paul Auster’s work is an aesthetic-literary self-reflection about the mission of writing. The writer-character is like an inexperienced God, whose hands may originate either cosmos or chaos, life or death, hence Auster’s recurring meditation on the work and the power of writing, at the same time an autobiography and a self-criticism. The stones, the wall, and the room – the words, the page, and the book – are the ontological structure of the imaginary cosmos generated in Paul Auster’s mind, like a real world born of the magma of words lost in another, interior world.

The present book explores detective and crime-mystery fiction and film from the perspective of their entrenched metaphors of paradox. --Book Jacket.