Some Coover Links

To start, here's the Kelly Writers House Fellows page on Coover, assembled in preparation for his visit next week to UPenn's campus. You'll have the opportunity to tune in to a live webcast of his reading Monday evening, as well as his conversation with Al Filreis (director of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing) on Tuesday morning:

• Kelly Writers House Fellows

Here are the original New York Times reviews for the two books we're reading (hold off on reading the second one until you've finished the novel):

• Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Here's what ostensibly passes for a book review — of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, of all things — in which Coover, working in a very Coover-like manner, creates an imaginative work of metafiction by sampling liberally from that famous collection's aphorisms:

• Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Coover is also well-known as a proponent of hyperfiction — a computer-aided form of literature, once housed on CD-ROMs, and now drafted in HTML or XML, which, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, allows readers to take more control over their reading experience. There's still some interesting work being produced in this area (a few links below), but admittedly, a lot of the material seems very thin and clunky to contemporary eyes. Coover spelled out some of the implications of this genre in a pair of articles, also in the Times, in 1992 and 1993:

• "The End of Fiction"
• "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer"

Coover is also a founder and head of the Electronic Literature Foundation, a group "founded in 1999 to foster and promote the reading, writing, teaching, and understanding of literature as it develops and persists in a changing digital environment." You can read some electronic texts by visiting the Electronic Literature Directory. Also, here are a pair of PennSound pages which showcase discussions of electronic literature, complete with links to example texts. Stefans (who studied with Coover at Brown) talks more about the future potential for computer-aided poetics, while Funkhouser gives a wonderful overview of the history of computer-writing:

• Brian Kim Stefans' "Language as Gameplay"
• Chris Funkhouser's "IBM Poetry: Exploring Restriction in Computer Poems"

Following this link will take you to Al Filreis' blog entry on "The Cave," a virtual-reality literary environment Coover helped create at the University of Iowa. You can even see a brief video recreation of what it's like to experience "The Cave." Finally, here are a few more videos featuring Coover:



a trailer for the film adaptation of "The Babysitter," which gives you some idea of just how bad it is



A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.