Readings / Renderings of America
Keywords:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Melville, Herman, Gass, William, Coover, Robert, Marcus, Ben, reading, hermeneutics, performative, ephemeralAbstract
This paper aims at showing how problematic and conflictual the relations between American literature-here arbitrarily conceived in very general terms-and its reading can be. The examples, deliberately given in no particular order, range from Melville and Hawthorne to William Gass, Robert Coover and Ben Marcus. The main purpose is to see how these overly fictional texts-fictional in the sense that they short-circuit and invalidate any mimetic relation between fiction and reality-while questioning and staging their very meaning, end up bringing out the shifting contours of a chronic and virtual "America" that lies beyond both chronology and history. So doing, these texts entice, not to say compel, their reader, as they program their misreading in plots which keep sabotaging their own authority, to unread them rather, in favour of a performative gesture meant to resist any hermeneutic practice as far as possible.
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