Lawrence F. McCaffery Jr. (born May 13, 1946) is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. [1] He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre. [2]
McCaffery was born in 1946 in Dallas, Texas. He received his PhD in 1975, with a dissertation on the works of Robert Coover. [3]
He joined the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University in 1976. He taught in SDSU's English Department until retiring in 2010. During his career as a professor, McCaffery took up visiting professorships at University of Nice, University of California, San Diego, Deep Springs College (where William T. Vollmann attended), Seikei University in Tokyo, Japan and was a Fulbright Lecturer at Beijing Foreign Studies University during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
In 1983, McCaffery published two books in the field of postmodern literary studies. The first was The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Coover, Gass, and Barthelme, which explored the emergence of the "meta-impulse" as one of the defining features of postmodern aesthetics. [4] The second was Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (with Tom LeClair), which helped identify the major innovative authors associated with postmodernism. [5]
McCaffery went on to publish three additional collections of interviews with contemporary authors: Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s with Sinda Gregory (1986), [6] Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Authors (1990), [7] and Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors (1995). [8] McCaffery explains that the interviews within these works begin orally, and, after being transcribed from tape and edited by both McCaffery and the interviewee, become "collaborative texts based on an actual conversation rather than a direct rendering of that conversation". [8] These works established "avant-prof" critic Lance Olsen to dub McCaffery as "Guru of the Interview" [9]
During his career as Professor at SDSU, McCaffery played a large role as editor of literary journals. In 1983, McCaffery arranged to have the literary journal, Fiction International move to SDSU from New York City, where it had been edited and published by Joe David Bellamy since 1973. [10] McCaffery served as co-editor of FI with Harold Jaffe for the next decade, during which it became one of the leading publishers of radically innovative, politically charged fiction. [10] Since the early eighties, he has also been an editor of American Book Review, and executive editor of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. McCaffery has guest-edited several special issues of other literary magazines, including Mississippi Review's landmark "Cyberpunk Issue". [11] [12]
His work Storming the Reality Studio placed science fiction and cyberpunk within the field of postmodern studies. [13] an anthology featuring the fictional work of authors such as William Gibson, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, and Harold Jaffe, as well as non-fiction by writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. [14] Other notable anthologies are Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993) and After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (1997). [15]
McCaffery is briefly mentioned in Raymond Federman's novel The Twofold Vibration, [19] and is mentioned throughout William T. Vollmann's book Imperial. [20] He has also been quoted in an article in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace's legacy. [21]
He created a theory of media/visual studies about the relation between memory, narrative, and sexuality called "Avant-Porn," as claimed in his introduction to Michael Hemmingson's 2000 anthology, WTF: The Avant-Porn Anthology. [22] a true account. [23]
McCaffery is also author of the popular best of list The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction. This list was written in response to Modern Library 100 Best Novels list (1999), which McCaffery saw as "being way, way out of touch with the nature and significance of 20th century fiction". [24] [25]
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.
John Simmons Barth is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history, Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world, and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction with the novel Europe Central.
Robert Lowell Coover is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Donald Barthelme Jr. was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction, and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Joseph Prince McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as Women and Men.
San Diego State University Press is a university press that is part of San Diego State University, with noted specializations in Border Studies, Critical Theory, Latin American Studies, Cultural Studies, and comics. It is the oldest university press in the California State University system. It presently publishes books under two rubrics: CODEX, focused on critical theory, and surTEXT, focused on Latin American/Transamerican Cultural Studies. In 2006, SDSU Press also inaugurated Hyperbole Books, specializing in "publishing cutting-edge, over-the-top experiments in critical theory, literary criticism and graphic narrative."
Susan Daitch is an American novelist and short story writer. In 1996 David Foster Wallace called her "one of the most intelligent and attentive writers at work in the U.S. today."
You Bright and Risen Angels is a 1987 novel by William T. Vollmann, detailing a fictional war between insects and the forces of modern civilization. Vollmann described the book, his first, as "an allegory in part", inspired by his experiences with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The novel is subtitled "A Cartoon." It is illustrated by the author.
Michael Hemmingson was a novelist, short story writer, literary critic, cultural anthropologist, qualitative researcher, playwright, music critic and screenwriter. He died in Tijuana, Mexico on 9 January 2014. The reported cause was cardiac arrest.
Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, was published by Duke University Press in 1992, though most of its contents had been featured in Mississippi Review in 1988.
Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation is a Fiction Collective Two book published by Black Ice Books in 1992 edited by Larry McCaffery. It is a collection of innovative fiction, graphic art, and various unclassifiable texts written by some of the most radical literary talents who McCaffery classifies as Avantpop. In his introductory chapter, McCaffery calls these writers "a new breed of pop-culture demolition artists". These writers include cult figures such as Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany, Harold Jaffe and Derek Pell, as well as young new writers such as Euridice, Mark Leyner, and William T. Vollmann.
The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction is a list of the 100 best English-language books of the 20th century compiled by American literary critic Larry McCaffery. The list was created largely in response to the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list (1999), which McCaffery considered out of touch with 20th-century fiction. McCaffery wrote that he saw his list "as a means of sharing with readers my own views about what books are going to be read 100 or 1000 years from now".
The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal published by Dalkey Archive Press. It features a variety of fiction, reviews and critical essays on literature that has an experimental, avant-garde or subversive bent. Founded in 1980 by the publisher John O'Brien, The Review of Contemporary Fiction originally focused upon American and British writers who had been overlooked by the critical establishment, and in this manner the Review succeeded in bringing new critical attention to writers such as William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Metcalf, Nicholas Mosley, Donald Barthelme, and many others. In 1984, in order to begin reprinting some of these authors, John O'Brien founded Dalkey Archive Press.
The Rainbow Stories is a collection of short stories about American culture written by William T. Vollmann and published in 1989. Written in the style of narrative journalism, it was his second published fictional work, preceded by You Bright and Risen Angels. The book consists of thirteen interlocking stories that range in scope from ancient Babylon to modern San Francisco. Steven Moore wrote of the book that "Vollmann's verbal prowess, empathy, and astonishing range put him in a class apart from his contemporaries." Robert Rebein described the book as a "real breakthrough" for Vollman, stating: "[Rainbow Stories is] a book that mixed reportorial and fictional techniques to powerfully evoke the lives of prostitutes and skinheads on the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin district."
The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut is a novel by Robert Coover, published in 2002. The title is the same as a 1961 nudie cutie film, and like the film, the novel is divided into multiple vignettes, starring the title character Pierre.
Avant-pop is popular music that is experimental, new, and distinct from previous styles while retaining an immediate accessibility for the listener. The term implies a combination of avant-garde sensibilities with existing elements from popular music in the service of novel or idiosyncratic artistic visions.
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