| For this book, I owe debts that mere acknowledgments cannot begin to repay. I thank Jeanne Ruppert, director, Florida State University Press, for her enthusiasm, her style, and her keen intelligence. I thank Shirley Strum Kenny, provost, Division of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland, and Annabel Patterson, chairwoman, Department of English, University of Maryland, for their vision, their courage, and their unfailing support. And I thank the friends and colleagues who have discussed this book with me and the writers and aritics who have kindly responded to queries about the pertinence of their own work to itespecially Walter Abish, Nikhilesh Banerjee, Herbert Blau, Rgis Durand, Raymond Federman, Kenneth Gangemi, Ihab Hassan, Sally Hassan, Douglas Messerli, Paul Smith, and Alan Wilde. |
| I developed the idea and configuration of this book while at the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee; I owe much to this center's former director, my friend and past collaborator, the late Michel Benamou. The book took shape at the University of Maryland, and I wish to thank that institution's General Research Board for a summer grant that facilitated the completion of one chapter and its Department of English for release time that enabled the completion of another. Finally, I revised and prepared this book for publication while holding an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities of Wesleyan University. For their friendship, intellectual stimulation, and kindnesses impossible to enumerate, I wish to honor the memory of the late Louis O. Mink, director of the center, and to thank Khachig Tololyan, its associate director. |
| Portions of this book have appeared earlier in different form: chapter 3, as "Fleshing Out Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife," in Sub-stance, no. 27 (1980): 59-72 (copyright by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System): chapter 5, as "Flushing Out 'The Voice in the Closet,'" in Sub-stance, no. 20 (1978): 101-13 (copyright by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System); and chapter 6, as "On the Guideless Guidebooks of Postmodernism: Reading |
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