Novel As Performance The Fiction of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman

This first full-length study of leading con­temporary writers Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman defines the differ­ence between modern and postmodern writers as the distinction between mime­tic and performance art. Larry McCaffery notes that "Kutnik's thesis is that performance art engages the artist and the audience in a process whose function is fundamentally differ­ent from the mimetic tradition... that is, rather than aiming atrepresentingsome preexisting state of affairs, perfor­mance art seeks tobe an experience for its own sake,an experience which is ultimately to be recognized as continu­ous with reality and not merely an occa­sion for interpretation and analysis." Postmodernists such as Sukenick and Federman spotlight themselves in the act of writing. Thus their creations have a life of their own, and the act of writing is so much a part of that life that the process of creation is as important as the end product. Kutnik's metaphor for this proc­ess is performance art.Kutnik, Jerzy is the author of 'Novel As Performance The Fiction of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman' with ISBN 9780809312498 and ISBN 0809312492.