Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 399-401

Christian Moraru, Rewriting: Postmodern narratives and cultural critiques in the age of cloning. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001; 230 pp.; ISBN: 0791451089; LC call no.: PS228.P68 M67; $19.95

Christian Moraru writes an ambitious book about two difficult concepts whose meanings differ a great deal from critic to critic: postmodernism and literary reception. While theorists are more and more cautious about employing the term "postmodernism," Moraru, drawing mostly from Linda Hutcheon and Matei Călinescu, adopts a practical definition of postodernism as rewriting. His essay looks at "how postmodern narrative reworks nineteenth-century tales, stories, novels, and novellas" (xi).

Defining rewriting as a postmodern mechanism and a reception category, Moraru analyzes the re-readings of a number of American novels that initiated a dialogue with texts written, in most cases polemically, to amend social, political, and aesthetic "misrepresentations" that were haunting the new authors who approached them. Therefore the concept of misreading or, rather, of "miswriting" (158) becomes crucial in Moraru's choice of corpus as most of the postmodern authors he discusses have a political agenda embedded in the aesthetic efforts to re-write or create their own reading of canonical or popular stories. [end page 399]

Bakhtin's and Kristeva's work on intertextuality blend with reception theories and narrative analysis in Moraru's discussion of postmodernism as rewriting. In most of the novels discussed, "whole narratives are retold" (35). Moraru points out that in the process of postmodern rewriting, "literary and ideological intertextuality go hand in hand" (35).

As examples of intertextual discursive practices, Moraru reads E.L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, and Paul Auster as they rewrite the American "national narrative." The critic argues that, for these authors, who re-tell stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Henry D. Thoreau or Horatio Alger, rewriting functions as a double critique, "of the past and the past source, as well as of the present and its ideological tall tales" (xiii).

Rewriting as a historical and political tool is analyzed in the work of African American postmodern authors. Moraru examines Ishmael Reed's retelling, in Flight to Canada (1976), of slave narratives such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. He also shows how Reed "purloins" 19^th texts such as Poe's tales by analyzing the author's respect for, obsession with, and distance from Poe's work (Poe being a postmodernist avant la lettre in his blurring of the boundaries between fiction and fact). Among the radical narrative practices used by Ishmael Reed, the author cites the "outwriting" and the "ventriloquizing techniques" (xiv).

The critic argues that Charles Johnson makes use of elements from Wright's and Ellison's writing in Faith and the Good Thing (1974), and develops intertextual strategies that reveal a sophisticated intellectual response to literary history in Oxherding Tale (1982), and later comes to question Melville's pessimism about social injustice in Middle Passage (1990). Moraru also discusses Trey Ellis's "hypertext as a "hip-hop Signifyin(g)" apparatus of literary rewriting (124). These authors' dialogue with the canonical texts they address adds a new dimension to the endeavours of the previous group in that their polemic is aesthetic as well as historical and political.

Moraru also takes up feminist rewriting of sexist texts. Postmodernism is understood, for this group of writers as well, as a revisionist enterprise that questions aesthetics and politics at the same time. He bases his reading of feminist revisionist rewritings on Hélène Cixous' construal of feminist writing as a reworking of the masculine literary tradition (36). One of the examples of feminist rewriting in Moraru's essay is Mukherjee's The Holder, "an apocryphal refurbishing" of the Scarlet Letter (158), where the author imagines what she believes could have been omitted in Hawthorne's novel.

Moraru's definition of rewriting resembles Lacan's understanding of the coming back of the "other" and Shoshana Felman's Kierkegaardian redefinition of repetition, "not of sameness, but of difference" (147-8). It is [end page 400] because existing texts do not answer in a satisfactory manner the questions having being raised that rewriting them becomes a necessary enterprise. These texts come back to haunt literary tradition and new readers/authors engage in a polemical dialogue with them in order to deconstruct their assumptions, correct wrong premises, or open more widely the door of interpretation. The questions asked by older texts might have been ground-breaking at the time of their publication, but remained dated for the new authors who tackle them. Reading and writing become interwoven in the postmodern era, and literary reception comes to coincide with textual production. Readers of these postmodern texts are called upon to use their imagination and judgment when caught in complex ideological and aesthetic games. Well documented and argued, Moraru's book will remain an important reference work and addition to postmodernist scholarship.

Fevronia Novac

SSHRC, Ottawa