Rezensionen 336 rary critical terminology, though substantially researched, may often go beyond the comprehension of educated readers as well. One major weakness of the volume is the fact that only in the Preface is there mention of the use of the expression/ term/ word “Orient”. The term itself is egregious; the word “Orient” is mostly employed to denote the Near and Middle East, Egypt, etc. Is “Orient” to be construed as “non-western? ” One flounders quite a bit in trying to grasp what “Orient” is and develops a certain uneasy response to the collection. The reader vaguely realizes a certain ‘negative’ aspect about the essays, despite solid scholarship of the essayists as clearly indicated in the bibliographies. The flagrant omission of significant Oriental thought both in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature - Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, etc. - makes the volume somewhat lopsided, though the coverage as such is wide and extensive. So, what does “Orient” connote now? Is Middle East the “Orient”? Is Egypt “Orient”? Even Edward Said’s monumental groundbreaking work with its lofty title Orientalism is a misnomer. Said seems to interchangeably use terms such as “Islamic Orientalism,” “Arabic Orientalism,” etc. Is Islam an ‘Oriental’ religion? Questions like these remain unasked as well as unanswered, and this leaves space for future works on the topic. The present collection deserves to be scrupulously studied in small doses. Satyam S. Moorty English Department Southern Utah University Jaroslav Kušnír, Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2005. Teresa Requena What is the difference between literary modernism and postmodernism? Or, how is metafiction an emblematic strategy used in postmodernist literature? All these are questions that have characterized the debate about literary postmodernism in the last decades of the twentieth century and Kušnír’s new book Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction provides us with his own answers through the analysis of selected works by Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Paul Auster. Presented as the continuation of a previous study on postmodernist fiction - Poetika americkei postmodernei prózy: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme - Kušnír here extends his analysis to include more texts and authors than in his previous book. Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction consists of three chapters. The first, “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Donald Barthelme’s novels Snow White and Paradise,” opens with a theoretical discussion of the relation AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 337 between modernism and postmodernism in which Kušnír traces definitions of both movements in their literary manifestations and reveals the unsteady ground on which a strict differentiation between the two rests. One of the study’s main assets is the systematization of the postmodern taking as a starting point Brian McHale’s taxonomy of postmodernist aesthetic strategies. Such theoretical foundation allows for a useful differentiation between modernist and postmodernist literature. By drawing on Jakobson’s concept of the dominant, McHale successfully manages to identify the differences in use and philosophical approach that both modernist and postmodernist literature make of self-referentiality, for example. In this sense, it is the first chapter which most convincingly integrates theory and practice into the analysis of the texts, viz. Barthelme’s Snow White and Paradise. Here, Kušnír successfully manages to show the previously identified differences between modernist and postmodernist literature as well as Barthelme’s return to a more traditional modernist aesthetics in the later stage of his career with the novel Paradise. Condensing a wide-ranging debate in this theoretical introduction - the most elaborate one of the whole study - leads to a high density of quotations, which might slow the pace of reading. Longer introductions to the quotations would possibly have helped to integrate them into the argument more tighly. A better way of marking them formally, e.g. by indentation, would additionally have made the text more fluent. The book is the compilation of previous work carried out on these very same authors that Kušnír has presented at several conferences throughout the years. Such fact is made evident at some points in the text, where the editing process has skipped expressions such as “this paper analyzes,” (56) and which at times reveals a certain weakness in the overall cohesive structure of Kušnír’s study. This fact also surfaces in the second chapter, “Postmodernism and Popular Culture,” which contains four different subsections - “The Western,” “Pornography,” “Fairy tales as popular culture” and “Popular autobiography and Travel Book in One”. In “The Western,” Kušnír analyzes the postmodern parody of the western genre both in literature - E.L. Doctorow’s WelcomeTo Hard Times and Robert Coover’s The Ghost Town - and cinema - Coover’s “Adventure! Shootout at Gentry’s Junction”. However, it is not clear why the west as a myth resulted in different cultural codes that require a separate treatment of literature and film. Likewise, there exists some overlapping, such as Brautigan as an example of the subversion of the Western, in which the same ideas occur at several points in the analysis. The lack of cohesive structure also leads, for instance, to the repetition of certain quotations (for instance, Baldick’s, pp. 85, 88) or redundant definitions of concepts such as the identification of pornography in the analysis of Coover’s Lucky Pierre in the Doctor’s Office and Spanking the Maid. Despite such problems of content organization, the second chapter tackles the ways in which the use of popular genres in postmodernist literature becomes a questioning of the politics of representation. Thus, reality is presented through the distorted lens of parody, satire, or the grotesque, which Kušnír interestingly links to a critique of major constituent elements of U.S. society such as individualism, the American Dream, or consumerism. The third chapter, “Postmodernism and Metafiction,” addresses works in which metafiction becomes the dominant aesthetic strategy: in Coover’s The Marker and The Hat Act, Auster’s The Locked Room and Vonnegut’s Timequake. Here, Kušnír Rezensionen 338 anlayzes the ways in which the different writers achieve a metafictional effect in their texts. As Kušnír acknowledges in the preliminary section of the book, metafictional effects do also occur in the texts he has analyzed in the previous chapters. Although he systematizes the definition of metafiction in this third chapter, the notion has already been articulated earlier, e.g. in the analysis of Coover’s Briar Rose or Pinocchio in Venice in the second chapter. Such fragmentation of the defining characteristics of metafiction may be due to the fact that the remaining chapters do not follow the structure of the first one, in which Kušnír devotes a certain attention to the theoretical debate between modernism and postmodernism. This necessarily leads to a heterogeneous element in the definition of the term. Moreover, the fact that Kušnír identifies metafiction as a pivotal element in postmodernist fiction makes the restriction of its analysis to just one specific chapter somewhat impractical. Such fragmentation also affects the definition of parody as an aesthetic postmodernist strategy that aims at a revision of the past and a criticism of representation. One feels, however, that a more detailed discussion of the concept in theoretical terms would have been helpful. Kušnír’s drawing on Waugh’s - and, to a certain extent, on Hutcheon’s - theorization of the concept of parody as a strategy of subversion that lays bare the politics of representation seems to stand on the same grounds as Jameson’s. However, for the latter, parody is just a mimicry of previous forms that aims at casting ridicule at existing styles; it is, therefore, devoid of any political content. Again, a preliminary theoretical section might have eliminated such levelling. Kušnír’s book constitutes a significant contribution to the field of U.S. literature and the study of such iconic postmodernist authors as Coover. By showing how postmodern literature uses aesthetic strategies to question the politics of representation and identifying parody and metafiction as significant postmodernist literary manifestations, Kušnír provides a rich and diverse picture of postmodernist literature. Teresa Requena Department of English and German Universitat de Barcelona Susanne Rohr, Die Wahrheit der Täuschung. Wirklichkeitskonstitution im amerikanischen Roman 1889-1989. München: Fink, 2004. Katrin Amian Auf den ersten Blick kommt Susanne Rohrs Buch bescheiden daher. Der Titel verspricht eine Studie zur “Wirklichkeitskonstitution im amerikanischen Roman” zwischen 1889 und 1989, und tatsächlich widmet sich Rohr in drei großen Kapiteln ausführlich Werken von William Dean Howells und Henry James, Gertrude Stein und Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon und Paul Auster. Doch schon die Frage, mit der sie ihre Einführung beginnt, zeigt, dass es ihr um mehr als eine epistemologische AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2