Larry McCaffery

Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski

Abstract Remember those dire, premillennial pronouncements about the alarming marginalization of reading and writing in our increasingly visually oriented, digitalized Internet era? Or the claims that the ascendancy of visual media—most notably cinema but also television, video, and photography—had eclipsed the novel as our cultures preeminent means for modeling and interpreting contemporary experience? Or the related insistence that the Internet, hypertext, and other new forms of electronic writing capable of combining text, sound, and image had already made old-fashioned print-bound books, with their cumbersome physicality, increasingly unlikely to survive within the global villages electronic system of communication, with its bewildering proliferation of lingoes, databases, and channels?

“A Search for the Most Deeply Hidden Human Values”: Film Adaptations of Post-1950 Novels

From the inception of film as an art form, writers have been fascinated by its potential, its technology, its ability to represent in a different manner than with words alone, but somehow including words as part of its inherent functioning. The list of writers enticed by film is a long one, too long to enumerate here. And the fascination has not been a one-way street. Just as writers have been drawn to film—to write screenplays, to write about films, to include film in their fiction—so filmmakers have been drawn to novels—as a source for adaptation, its authors providing the potential for new ideas, and the like. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, wrote about film for the Argentinean literary journal, Sur. In one such review, of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Borges approaches the film by means of the two plots he isolates. His terms of comparison are literary: beyond plot and narrative strategies, he compares the film to the work of Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad (214–15). In the 1950s, Orson Welles tried his hand at novel writing, producing a novel, Mr. Arkadin (1955), which he adapted into a film of the same name. In both novel and film, Welles has the title figure tell stories; one most especially, of the scorpion and the frog, probes the nature of character as a literary (and human) quality (414). Writing about cinema in 1953, Cesare Zavattini (renowned Italian neorealist screenwriter) describes its relation to reality:

Kathy Acker: Always Missing—A Plagiarized Tribute

P recisely because women artists had been excluded from earlier versions of punk movements (if it was difficult for de Sade or Jarry or William Burroughs to find a niche for their extremist creative expressions, it was virtually unthinkable for a woman to do so), by the time Kathy Acker (1947– 1997) began writing in the early ’70s there were any number of intriguing new possibilities that had been left unexplored. Reacting to and playing with societal expectations about the “proper” nature of women artists and their work, Acker and her punk contemporaries created a space where alternative, often androgynous, identities could be discovered and expressed and where women could openly explore passions—even ugly, violent, sexually perverse passions. It was one thing for Jim Morrison to make obscene gestures and call for libidinal release and a merging of the self with the primal (“lizard”) energies within us; but when women artists like Patti Smith and Kathy Acker began to examine the sources of their separation from love and fulfillment by dramatizing violence, sexual oppression, and hidden desires, they were making an assertive, defiant break with restrictive cultural and aesthetic assumptions.

The Public Burning, Coover's Fiery Masterpiece, on Center Stage Again

Abstract This issue of Critique is devoted to Robert Coovers The Public Burning; the idea for such an issue was initially conceived by Cririques executive editors almost immediately after we received word that Grove Press was planning to reissue The Public Burning (with a new preface by William H. Gass) sometime in 1998. This reissue was an important literary event for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that the novel had somehow remained out of print for nearly fifteen years. A massive, unclassifiable work of great power, thematic ambition, linguistic bravado, and savage, Swiftian satiric wit, The Public Burning had originally ken published by Viking in 1977.