Loading...
 
Information about Gordon E. Slethaug
Print
Gordon E. Slethaug is Chairman of the Program in American Studies, at the University of Hong Kong.

Author of

The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Southern Illinois University Press)

In his review of this book Michael Zeitlin writes:

For Gordon Slethaug, even a perfectly respectable framing of texts engenders, in the first instance, a heavy sense of guilt. At the outset of The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction, Slethaug cites Foucault on the dangers of "closure and teleology" (7), of "any certainty in the presentation of the history of ideas, for
Foucault finds that history is a reflection of the People who write it and hence invent it rather than a valid, objective interpretation of indisputable facts" (7). Foucault reverberates as a kind of superego function, weaving a network of prohibitions and warnings along any path the critic may choose to explore, in this case "the play of the postmodern double" in Nabokov's Despair, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Hawkes' Blood Oranges, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Brautigan's Hawkline Monster, and Federman's Double or Nothing. In accordance with Foucault's warnings and Slethaug's announced theme, those values associated with "unitary" wholeness, coherence, stability, reason, and meaning are to be suspected and warded off, even if they are never to be escaped absolutely. Hence Slethaug acknowledges that, perforce, his study "risks my emphasis creating origins, installing fixed categories, controlling knowledge, attempting to understand the past through present circumstances and beliefs" (8). As a countermeasure against such "totalizing" impulses, Slethaug suggests that his "readers should rightly challenge some of my implicit assumptions and explicit categories" (6).

Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction (State University of New York Press)

Co-author with Stan Fogel of

Understanding John Barth University of South Carolina Press, 1990) 0872496600

Teaching interests: globalization, the American city (especially New York), the road in American culture, ethnicity (especially Asian American and Native American), and America and Transnationalism.

Research interests: contemporary American novel, film, and culture as well as cross-cultural pedagogy.

Email slethaug at hkucc.hku.hk