Article:

From Surfiction to Hypertext: Interview with Raymond Federman

Raymond Federman, born in France (1928), emigrated to the U.S. in 1947 (after he survived deportation to Auschwitz as the only person of his family), is one of contemporary literature's most radical thinkers and influential authors and critics. He was a Distinguished Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Buffalo (he is now retired] but considers himself primarily a fiction writer. Federman has published several books of criticism on the work of Samuel Beckett as well as contemporary literature, numerous essays and articles, four volumes of poems and ten novels, written in English or French, translated into German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, and Chinese. Federman has received numerous awards, and was a fellow/artist in residence in France, Israel, and Germany. There he gave his poetic lectures in 1990 (published in 1992 in Edition Suhrkamp) about Surfiction and the prospects of literature. Roberto Simanowski talked to Raymond Federman about contemporary aesthetics of spectacle, the concept of surfiction and critifiction, and its relation to hyperfiction and realfiction.