Guest of the ilb 2003
Raymond Federman is internationally considered one of the most influential representatives of postmodern literature. The French-American writer and literature scholar of Jewish descent was born in 1928 in Paris. However, he dated his "real" date of birth as July 16, 1942, the day when more than 12,000 people were arrested in Paris and deported to the concentration camps. Federman’s parents and both of his sisters were killed at Auschwitz. He himself survived because his mother hid him in a cupboard. Federman emigrated to the U.S. in 1947 where he got by as a casual laborer and jazz saxophonist until he was drafted to the army in 1951; he served as a parachutist in Korea. In 1953 he was granted U.S. citizenship. In 1954 he began to study Comparative Literature at Columbia University and concluded his studies in 1963, at UCLA with a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Beckett with whom he became close friends. Starting in 1977, numerous guest professorships brought him to Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Although his work encompasses books of poetry, volumes of essays, scholarly work, articles, and translations, he considered himself primarily as a novelist. His experimental debut novel 'Double or Nothing' was published in 1971; it later received numerous awards and caused his immediate international reputation. The novel links the formal experiments of concrete poetry with epic prose and is considered one of the most important avant-garde works of the past century. His extensive, highly autobiographical work revolves around the sense of isolation and guilt felt by someone who survived by mere chance; this is also the case in 'Take It or Leave It', which he himself has referred to as his most important book. In his Hamburger poetry lectures (1990), borrowing from Surrealism, he coined the term 'surfiction' for the type of literature that exposes the fictive nature of reality and is characterized by repetitions, digressions, and personal reflections. In 2001 'Loose Shoes' was published, a journal-like book about his intellectual work, consisting of 365 experimental fragments and containing the programmatic motto against which the entirety of his work must be understood: “A novel is not so much about writing an adventure as it is about the adventure of writing". Federman’s work, which has in part been published bilingually and which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, has received numerous awards, including the American Book Award (1986). Raymond Federman died October 2009 in San Diego.
© international literature festival berlin
Raymond Federman online: www.federman.com
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction
University of California Press
Berkeley, 1965
Samuel Beckett: His Works and his Critics
University of California Press
Berkeley, London, 1970
Double or Nothing
Swallow Press
Chicago, 1971
Amer eldorado
Stock
Paris, 1974
Me Too
West Coast Poetry Review
Reno, 1975
Surfiction
Swallow Press
Chicago, 1975
Take it or Leave it
The Fiction Collective
New York, 1976
The Voice in the Closet
Coda Press
Madison/ Wisconsin, 1979
The Twofold Vibration
Indiana University Press
Bloomington, 1982
The Rigmarole of Contrariety
The Bolt Court Press
Buffalo/ New York, 1982
Smiles on Washington Square
Thunder´s Mouth Press
New York, 1985
To Whom it May Concern
The Fiction Collective
Boulder/ Colorado, 1990
Critifiction: Postmodern Essays
State University of New York Press
Albany/ New York, 1993
The Supreme Indecision of the Writer
The Boltcourt Press
Buffalo/ New York, 1995
Aunt Rachel’s Fur
FC2
Normal/Tallahassee, 2001
Loose Shoes: A Life Story of Sorts
Weidler
Berlin, 2001
99 Hand Written Poems
Weidler
Berlin, 2001
The Twilight of the Bums
[with George Chambers]
Alt-X Press
Boulder/ Colorado, 2001
Two Jazz Poems
Print Matters!
Dansville/ NY, 2001
The Story of the Sparrow
Spineless Books
Urbana/ Ill., 2002
My Body in Nine Parts
Starcherone
Buffalo/ NY, 2005
Return to Manure
FC2
Tuscaloosa/ Alabama, 2006
The Sam Book
Two Ravens
Ullapool, 2008
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