Time, Narrative and Imagination: essays on Paul Auster (one volume collection of essays in English)
updated:
Friday, January 31, 2014 - 8:40am
dr Arkadiusz Misztal, English Institute, Gdansk University, Poland
In his introduction to Conversations with Paul Auster James M. Hutchinson observes that Auster's love of experimentation and eagerness to test new boundaries often confound critics' expectations and make his narratives problematic in terms of generic categorization. Moreover, Auster's work "at times seems so implausibly imaginative that critics sometimes tend to discount the seriousness of his art" (xviii). If there is anything like a common thread that runs through all of his stories, it is perhaps Auster's persistent and determined blurring of the line between the real and the imagined. As August Brill, a retired literary critic in Man in the Dark puts it, "the real and the imagined are one".