Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett: Voices in the Closet

(Hardback)

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This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federmans creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet.

Reviews

Camerlynck has deeply researched Raymond Federmans writings in both English and French, shedding light on Federmans complex relationship with Beckett, his mentor, model and rival. There are striking discoveries here literally on every page, sometimes in every sentence, adding up to a dense, detailed, full and ultimately persuasive picture of the literary practice of an important avant-gardist. Brian McHale, The Ohio State University, US

Nathalie Camerlynck's fascinating and insightful book illuminates, in a new way, the work of both Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett. Ray was, during the decades I knew him, continually reinventing himself through his fictions. It was Beckett who gave him the prism that made that reinvention possible. Read Camerlynck and youll understand how. Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture, University at Buffalo, US

Nathalie Camerlynck provides a comprehensive guide to Raymond Federmans debts to, and reimaginings of, Samuel Beckett. For the brilliant trickster novelist, Becketts presence is not a source of anxiety but a prod for textual freedom. No American novelist has made better use of this freedom than Federman. Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, US

The point of playing the game of literature and criticism lies not in shoring up the bourgeois credentials of the writer and scholar, a recurring Federman target, but in confronting the horror vacui of identity and, in Federmans case, his Holocaust experience. Nathalie Camerlynchs Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett will rejuvenate interest in the work of one the original postmodernist writers. Christopher Conti, Lecturer in Literary Studies, Western Sydney University, Australia

This book breaks entirely new ground by queering Federman through his amorously idolizing and playfully antagonistic rapport with Beckett, whom he invoked as both God and a dog. Focusing less on sexual experience than on textual experimentation, Camerlynck teases out the strands of queerness in the dialogue between Federmans early prose and Becketts novels and short stories. She thus reveals the existence of a second, metaphorical closet, in addition to the Parisian site of Federmans rebirth as a Holocaust survivor. The cleverness and subtlety of her analyses, as well as the sheer amount of evidence gathered and skillfully assembled, will overcome any residual resistance to this reframing of a self-styled Gallic lady killer. Rainier Grutman University of Ottawa, Canada

Author Bio

Nathalie Camerlynck is a scholar working at the intersection of bilingual poetics and queer theory. Her background is in the study of Samuel Beckett, self-translation and intertextuality.