Paul Auster's Ghosts: The Echoes of European and American Tradition

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The following book explores the intertextual relationship between Paul Austers first and most remarkable work, The New York Trilogy (1987), and the works of certain American and European writers who shaped this novel and Austers future works. Austers The New York Trilogy is a novel formed by an intertextual dialogue which in some cases it is explicit, mentioning authors and books intentionally, and in others implicit, provoked by Austers admiration for authors such as Samuel Beckett or product of his role as a translator, as it occurs with Maurice Blanchot. These two different ways of intertextuality essentially show Austers influence of the American Renaissance, Samuel Becketts fiction and the work of the writer and critic Maurice Blanchot. In these terms, this book proposes an exhaustive analysis of City of Glass and Herman Melvilles Bartleby, the Scrivener, Ghosts and Edgar Allan Poes William Wilson and The Locked Room and Nathaniel Hawthornes Fanshawe. The two last chapters also offer a thorough analysis of the whole trilogy in comparison to Samuel Becketts trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable and finally introduces a study of the trilogy as a fictionalization of Maurice Blanchots literary theory.

Author Bio

Mara Laura Arce lvarez is assistant professor of American literature at the Universidad Autnoma de Madrid