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Coover's Revisionist Fantasy
- Abstract
IN THE past two decades, the American writers dedicated to the kind of big, artfully disheveled, anticly serious novel which infallibly excites the Zeitgeist brigade have felt themselves brought to an impasse. Unhinged if not hopelessly defeated by external reality, they have been unable to deal with a world that is either completely irrational and empty of meaning or, at the least, without discernible patterns of order. On the level of character, their simulations of human behavior are consistently overpowered by an actuality which, as Philip Roth complained, “is continually outdoing our talents . . . the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. Who, for example, could have invented Charles Van Doren? Roy Cohn and David Schine? . . . Dwight David Eisenhower?”
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