Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth

This text aims to increase the reader's understanding of the comic in the work of three major contemporary North American writers. It tries, on the one hand, to do justice to the specificity of the "oeuvre" of each of the writers it deals with and, on the other, to come to grips with the comic as a theoretical problem of the criticism of much contemporary fiction. The term "comic sense" implies both a quality of the fiction discusssed in this book and a particular way of reading this fiction. Pughe concentrates mainly on the texts of his three authors: Robert Coover's "A Night at the Movies" and "The Public Burning", Stanley Elkin's "The Dick Gibson Show", "The Franchiser" and "The Magic Kingdom" and Philip Roth's Zuckerman series. His readings are based on a reconsideration of traditional and modern theories of the comic and show that the literary significance of the texts discussed here is closely intertwined with the authors' - and their readers' - comic sense.