Understanding Robert Coover

Abstract: Sexual violence, a prevalent problem in the spousal relationship, is closely related to the issue of female consciousness. In The Babysitter, Coover (1989) tells of a teenage girl babysitting two kids and a baby and of two of her male peers and the children’s father altogether exploring their obsession towards her and, moreover, traces the evaluation and devaluation of women to the presentation of TV exploring its influence on his heroines, namely Mrs. Tucker and the babysitter serving as victims of the patriarchal society. Through a close engagement with the sexual objectification theory, this paper analyzes in detail men’s aggressive oppressions upon women as well as women’s compromise and rebellion towards the sexual violence, and investigates that the awakening of female independent consciousness is a key factor in effectively helping women achieve the gender equality between sexes.

Abstract: Abstract In her seminal book on metafiction, Patricia Waugh describes this practice as an obliteration of the distinction between “creation” and “criticism.” This article examines the interplay of the “creative” and the “critical” in five American metafictions from the late 1960s, whose authors were both fictional writers and scholars: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants and Ronald Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. The article considers the ways in which the voice of the literary critic is incorporated into each work in the form of a self-reflexive commentary. Although the ostensible principle of metafiction is to merge fiction and criticism, most of the self-conscious texts under discussion are shown to adopt a predominantly negative attitude towards the critical voices they embody – by making them sound pompous, pretentious or banal. The article concludes with a claim that the five works do not advocate a rejection of academic criticism but rather insist on its reform. Their dissatisfaction with the prescriptivism of most contemporary literary criticism is compared to Susan Sontag’s arguments in her essay “Against Interpretation.”

Abstract: The paper aims at studying the patterns of the male fantasy in Robert Coover’s erotically charged short story, “The Babysitter”. The story centres on the image of a Babysitter stepping into a bathtub for having a shower while the phone in the living room rings, driving her out of the tub to answer it by the time the towel wrapping her pulls off giving a view of her naked body. In a rapid succession of one hundred and seven fragmented paragraphs, this image vividly recurs in and rolls up through the fantasies to fantasies of its male characters, blurring and overlapping these, creating fresh new versions of the story from the Babysitter being raped to the Babysitter saved from being raped. The study examines a clear line of development in the fantasies of each of these characters. Considering age, sexual orientation, experiments, adjustment and satisfaction, personality, and other socio-cultural variables, it (re)conceptualizes their fantasies as falling into certain patterns like obsessive, childlike, romantic, or deviant. And, finally and most importantly, it explores the binary power relation embedded in these fantasies wherein the Babysitter poses a fetish, an inanimate, sexualized object while the fantasies around her confirm to male/sexual power, violence, and masochistic pleasure. The research approaches the fantasies with psycho-feminist viewpoints.