Robert Coover Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kathryn Hume

SOURCE: "Robert Coover's Fiction: The Naked and the Mythic," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 2, Winter, 1979, pp. 127-48.

Hume is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, she defends Coover against charges of pitilessness and sadism, and argues that Coover's fiction demonstrates the interconnected nature of "the naked," symbolizing human inadequacy, and "the mythic," through which characters attempt to overcome this sense of impotence. Focusing on the novels The Origin of the Brunists, The Universal Baseball Association, and The Public Burning, Hume also traces parallels between Coover's fiction and the postmodern works of such authors as Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Reviewers of Coover's novels respond—critically, in the main—to his flamboyant use of archetypes. "Patterns, myths, symbols, and folklore are Coover's stock-in-trade" (Commonweal [28 October 1977]). Newsweek [8 August 1977] complains of the "predilection for theology, which has been an...
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