SOURCE: "Practicing Post-Modernism: The Example of John Hawkes," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 38-57.

In the following essay, Unsworth defends Jerome Klinkowitz's assertion that contemporary artists and writers influence each other by examining the relationship between John Hawkes and Albert Guerard.

"The excitement of contemporary studies is that all of its critical practitioners and most of their subjects are alive and working at the same time. One work influences another, bringing to the field a spirit of competition and cooperation that reaches an intensity rarely found in other disciplines" (x). In these remarks on "contemporary studies," Jerome Klinkowitz takes for granted that contemporary writers and their critics belong to one "discipline," the academic discipline of literary study. This affiliation of criticism and creative writing within a single institutional framework does indeed compound the influence that critic and author have on one another's work, as it multiplies...