The Reference of Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan's text is both playful about its seriousness and serious about its playfulness. The figure of Benjamin Franklin is evoked to register its commitment to the constructivist line in American writing, its preoccupations with language's material engagements and with the action of writing itself. As self-advertisably experimental and astutely conscious of its literariness, its ludic mode and capacity for error become characteristics of a reclamation of the human, set against the oppressions of increasing mechanisation. Hence, it foregrounds the features of its own practices of radical discontinuity, narrative dispersals, disjunctions and, above all, the extravagant freeplay of its figuration. Consequently, the relations between language, self and the world are seen insistently as always mobile and provisory, resisting the confinements of actuality while recognising also the necessity for oblique engagement with actuality. The reader is encouraged to read the text in autobiographical terms that are powerfully anti-autobiographical—refusing singularity of voice and self, linear development, and notions of origin and of authenticity

Action (physics · Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Foregrounding · Literariness · Literature · Narrative · Seriousness · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · Computer Science · Irish and British Studies · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Themes in Literature Analysis · History · Philosophy

• A Narrative History

  Open Access•John Gledhill•Critique of Anthropology•1988

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