Memorious Discourse may be read as another advance of Moraru's continuing ambitious project of exploring questions of representation/re-presentation from the polemical perspectives of postmodernism and critical theory. His first book, Poetica reflectarii (Poetics of Reflection; 1990) is subtitled Essay in the Archaeology of Mimesis. In Rewriting (2001), he reads postmodern writers as undertaking the task of critical rewriting of 19th-century American fiction, insofar as the myths of mystifications of the latter still constitute a potent ideological force in US culture. Memorious Discourse brings to light yet more philosophical and political issues in ways that disrupt our settled views of literary representation. It firmly establishes Moraru as a major voice in the field of literary-postmodernism scholarship, one to be ranked alongside those of Marcel Cornis-Pope, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, Alan Wilde, Larry McCaffery, Joseph Tabbi, and Patrick O'Donnell. Rigorously argued and elegantly written, Memorious Discourse is sure to become, in Moraru's felicitous terminology, a key intertext in the cultural archive, one to which subsequent commentary on postmodern fiction will be memoriously indebted.
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