Postmodern Film and Fiction Intermediating: Texture, Spectacle, Theatricality, and Violence in Robert Coover’s Texts

This study recognizes reciprocal interplay of cinematography and literature, which constitute one another in a dynamic process of remediation, while highlighting intermedial reflexivity from screen to paper and how its “cinematic,” multifaceted dimensions of imagery, art, movement, technology, and industry interact with paper-based writings of Robert Coover. Embracing the techniques and forms of screen technologies, as well as exposing their ideological constructions and stereotypes, Coover’s texts reveal filmlike texture, spectacle, theatricality, and violence, disclosing the disintegration of the confines in-between media, as well as relative non-distinction of the frontier between the real and the mediated, where virtuality imposes as a cultural force and dominates actuality. The study is informed by Paul Virilio’s, Jean Baudrillard’s, and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts on how media and image-manipulation imprison the viewers through means of identification, and how cinematography contributes to the genesis of a new notion of reality.

Keywords:

American Studies, American Film Film Studies,

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