Paul Auster's Writing Machine : A Thing to Write With
Author(s): Evija Trofimova
Paul Auster is one of the most acclaimed figures in American literature. Known primarily as a novelist, Auster's films and various collaborations are now gaining more recognition. Evija Trofimova offers a radically different approach to the author's wider body of work, unpacking the fascinating web of relationships between his texts and presenting Auster's canon as a rhizomatic facto-fictional network produced by a set of writing tools.
Exploring Auster's literal and figurative use of these tools – the typewriter, the cigarette, the doppelgänger figure, the city – Evija Trofimova discovers Auster's "writing machine", a device that works both as a means to write and as a construct that manifests the emblematic writer-figure. This is a book about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them, and the ways such machines invest them with meaning.
Embarking on a scholarly quest that takes her from between the lines of Auster's work to between the streets of his beloved New York and finally to the man himself, Paul Auster's Writing Machine becomes not just a critical investigation but a critical collaboration, raising important questions about the ultimate meaning of Auster's work, and about the relationship between texts, their authors, their readers and their critics.
Review(s):
“Trofimova manages to imbue Auster’s complex universe with new tools to observe and critique the products of his beloved typewriter, an object of persistent examination. Auster is often decidedly at home in a dislocated literary landscape, and Trofimova’s book provides a welcome sense of stability. It emphasises the ‘thingness’ of objects that give a sturdiness, a ballast, to a body of work that is so often associated with loose or dissolving ontological grounds. Trofimova doesn’t merely retrace these steps with new language, but rather constructs a revitalising approach to understanding Auster’s idiosyncratic propositions for the locality of the line between text and world, and the relationship between the two.” - U.S. Studies Online
ISBN: 9781623569860