The Novel as Performance

When The Novel as Performance was first published in 1986 it was an instant classic of contemporary literary criticism: As the first book-length study of American postmodernist authors Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman it focuses on the "real fictitious" or performatory discourses of these significant authors who both repudiate "the idea of the novel as mimesis (representation) in favor of the genuinely postmodern idea of the novel as performance (presentation)." In his extensive first chapter, Kutnik offers an introduction to performance theory and "the antimimetic disposition of twentieth century art," followed by detailed analyses of the early fiction and literary theory (up to the early 1980s) of both Sukenick and Federman. The stage of the book is set by a lucid introduction by eminent critic Larry McCaffery. This new and expanded edition features Kutnik's essay on "Postmodern Language-Centered Writing and the Question of Ideology: A Polish Perspective" as its coda. Jerzy Kutnik was born in 1953 in Lublin, Poland, where he has lived since. In 1977 he graduated with an M.A. in English from Lublin's Maria Curie-Sklodowska University and subsequently taught American Studies there until his retirement in 2019. During his academic tenure he held several positions, including head of the Department of American Studies and vice-dean of Humanities at MCSU as well as president of the Polish Association for American Studies and member of the board of the European Association for American Studies. Kutnik also wrote two books in Polish on the American composer and writer John Cage and translated four novels into Polish, including Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing.