In the following essay, Seaboyer locates Pinocchio in Venice within a tradition of literary works about Venice and examines the novel's intertextual references and philosophical discourse, including allusions to Dante Alighieri, James Joyce, and Carlo Collodi, as they relate to the theme of metamorphosis, Menippean satire, and the Bakhtinian concept of carnival.
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 be...
In the following excerpt, Semrau cites The Origin of the Brunists, The Public Burning, and The Universal Baseball Association as examples of Coover's "musicalization of literature."
In the following excerpt, Ames discusses the variety of narrative codes in Gerald's Party, including "the patterns of detective story, slapstick comedy, masquerade, dream tale, and ritual sacrifice."
In the following essay, Joris examines Coover's metafictional approach to literature and his affinity for cinematic technique, as demonstrated by the title story of A Night at the Movies.
In the following essay, Frick offers a critical reevaluation of Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, which he considers an underappreciated achievement that offers important insight into the depressing reality faced by contemporary American writers who seek to imbue works of aesthetic excellence with political relevance.
Charlie in the House of Rue is a miniature tragicomedy which takes as its point of departure the character and conventions of a Charlie Chaplin film. The leading character is not only named Charlie, but he also physically resembles Chaplin…. Charlie falls into the same straits as his namesake, employs characteristic gestures (e.g., twirling his cane), and possesses the same elastic naivete. As the story progresses, however, we are drawn away from our preconceptions about a Chaplinesque Charlie and in...
Metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself. It may emphasize structural, formal, behavioral, or philosophical qualities, but most writers of metafiction are thoroughly aware of all these possibilities and are likely to have experimented with all of them…. [Consider] four works of metafiction by four American writers: John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme's City Life, Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants, and W. H. ...
An American critic, Eder received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and a 1987 citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. In the following, he provides a mixed review of Pinocchio in Venice.
In the following review of John's Wife, Mesic praises Coover's prose style, but finds shortcomings in the novel's exaggerated depravity and sprawling cast of characters.
[The] fiction of Robert Coover is tightly unified by its metafictional impulses. In examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, nearly all of Coover's works deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. Some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature…. Yet Coover's work is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems—such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of hist...
In the following essay, Petitjean argues that the narrative design of Coover's short story “The Babysitter” is intended to elicit multiple readings and interpretations.
Coover's fictions clearly emphasize their author's interest in providing his readers with the kinds of metaphors that are necessary for a healthy imagination. Unfortunately, Coover says between the lines in every story he writes, people today have lost their desire for the thrill of discovery. They have become comfortable with having their conventional viewpoints confirmed through a limited range of artistic forms that have outlived their usefulness. Each of Coover's stories, then, invi...
[In the story "The Hat Act," the] metaphor of the failing magician is a powerful one through which Coover suggests both the comedy of the artist's perspiring efforts to please and the horror of his possible failure to control his art; if he cannot master the techniques of his evolving craft, both the artist and his audience, it is clear, will experience fearful losses. Coover suggests that the contemporary artist—bound as he is to his audience as performer, magician, and funhouse...
In the following review of Briar Rose, Upchurch praises the novel, though notes that Coover's “manneristic flourishes and acrobatic syntax” will make the work inaccessible to some readers.
Like a child who pats a pile of wet sand into turrets and crenelated ramparts, Robert Coover prods at our most banal distractions and vulgar obsessions, nudging them into surreal and alarming forms. His fictions—novels, stories and, in ["A Theological Position"], plays—sound at times like incantations which, as they progress, mount to frenzy. What began slowly, seemingly grounded in homely realistic details, lurches, reels a bit, becomes possessed by manic excitation; the charact...
Robert Coover has turned Chaplin on his head. In Charlie in the House of Rue Coover has placed the Little Tramp in a house where his timing, no matter how perfect, can not draw from the other characters the slightest response. At first, the Tramp is merely annoyed by this. But Coover doesn't just pose for us the "what if nobody responded" question. He goes a step further and sets the supporting characters on their own courses.
Robert Coover's stories are mind games with a heart. In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters humanizes language games and literary theorizing, and, remarkably, does so by using cartoonish characters and a nearly anonymous narrative voice. While these nine very short pieces don't amount to much in themselves, they are miniature demonstrations of the control Coover displays in his more substantial work. Like a literary juggler, he keeps all the parts of his fiction in motion, balancing rhyth...
"The Cat in the Hat for President": that was the title of this satire [A Political Fable] when first published in 1968 (in the literary magazine New American Review)—and that's the single, inspired, ferocious joke (dated not one whit) that keeps most of these 88 miniature pages roaring along…. [The] Convention turns into a circus: first a catchy slogan starts appearing everywhere ("Let's make the White House a Cat House"); next, an irresistible campaig...
Denis Johnston wrote of Samuel Beckett that his works were "algebraic, in that his characters have the quality of X. And what X means, depends not upon him, but upon us." The Godot that bums wait for isn't simply God, but anything humans wait for that will solve everything…. Robert Coover, in his new novella ["Spanking the Maid"], has adopted Beckett's algebraic method. There is a "maid" and a "master," but they're as styliz...
If the Cat in the Hat were to publish novels for adults, they would probably read like the works of Robert Coover. A magician with both words and circumstances, Coover writes of American absurdities with a crazy infectious rhythm that makes his nonsense convincing…. The Cat in the Hat books our kids love portray … infantile dreams of messing up Mother's household, a mad unleashing of every childish whim. A Political Fable does the same for us adults who've been living with presid...
Parodic language is Coover's meat and potatoes. Words are where the action is and what the action is, so much so that the pieces [in A Theological Position] seem better adapted for radio than for stage. Coover's problem as a potential playwright is how to translate his large talent for sound effects into equally potent gesture and visible action. He solves the problem of a main action by exploiting in each piece a burlesque re-enactment of some form of ritual sacrifice, moving from the myth of...
[Spanking the Maid] is a failed attempt to employ the methods of the nouveau roman; the repetitions, the variations upon images, the structural loops, the shifts in perspective, all seem wearily imitative, forced, and pretentious. Each morning a maid enters her employer's bedroom, and each morning she is spanked for her failures…. [There] is an implicit invitation to see how the book is constructed…. [However], the machinery creaks, sputters, and grinds; the tricks are telegraphed, even...
[A Political Fable] is not exactly a new book. In fact, it is stretching things to resurrect in hardcover a short story that, when published in New American Review No. 4 in 1968, ran to 39 pages…. It's not that the fable, in which the renowned Dr. Seuss character gets the presidential nomination because of his charismatic magic tricks, doesn't hold up. But … A Political Fable seems more a trip down memory lane than a universal satire. The increasingly demonic nature of the Cat in...
[In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters includes short] takes displaying Coover's prodigious literary technique. A conventioneer's high jinks in a stream-of-consciousness mode; nonsequiturs on the interstate; and the wisdom of fresh starts: all become opportunities for Coover's manic and inventive invasion of the modern mind. John Brosnahan, in a review of "In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters," in Booklist, Vol. 80, No. 2, September 15, 1983, ...
Works by the Author
There are 11 critical essays on literary works by Robert Coover.
