Atopian limits : questions of self, complexity, and contingency in postmodern American narrative.

-Through the analysis of a series of American fictions which burst the reassuring limits of modern rationality to open upon the paroxystic, the catastrophic, the chaotic, Moncef gives an original, cutting-edge approach of postmodern imagination.... It is an extremely sharp and enlightening interdisciplinary approach of some fractured and destabilizing narratives that situate themselves at the edge of the abyss of madness, cruelty and death. A highly important contribution to the exegesis of most troubled fantasies of the postmodern condition.- (Jean-Joseph Goux)
-Very interesting.- (Julia Kristeva)
-A remarkable piece of historiography.- (Paul Maltby)
-Few critics have managed to read Auster's metafiction in the same context as Updike's suburban realism, and fewer still would have thought to look for Acker's nomadic subjects in Vidal's 'Duluth'. If Kesey's 'Combine' runs on bio-power and Harris's 'Silence of the Lambs' exposes a society that is no less species-centered than it is sexist, then perhaps the time has come to re-read fictions we thought we knew well. Salah el Moncef's systems-based approach has the potential to dislodge American literature from provincial moorings toward a more global context, whether or not American authors want to go there. This un-placed, atopian literature emerges as both a cognitive resource and a counternarrative, an imaginary alternative to the narrative of the industrial system with its national boundaries, representational structures, and linear spaces of -straight- reproduction. Postmodern theory may have reached its atopian limits, but in Moncef's hands theory can still open out into the wider field of contemporary fiction rather than closing in on a few canonical works.- (Joe Tabbi)
-This is the best study of subjectivity, postmodernity and American fiction I have read. My understanding of all three has been enriched by Moncef's very sophisticated work.- (Stephen Watt)"

Through the analysis of a series of American fictions which burst the reassuring limits of modern rationality to open upon the paroxystic, the catastrophic, the chaotic, Moncef gives an original, cutting-edge approach of postmodern imagination.... It is an extremely sharp and enlightening interdisciplinary approach of some fractured and destabilizing narratives that situate themselves at the edge of the abyss of madness, cruelty and death. A highly important contribution to the exegesis of most troubled fantasies of the postmodern condition. (Jean-Joseph Goux)
Very interesting. (Julia Kristeva)
A remarkable piece of historiography. (Paul Maltby)
Few critics have managed to read Auster's metafiction in the same context as Updike's suburban realism, and fewer still would have thought to look for Acker's nomadic subjects in Vidal's 'Duluth'. If Kesey's 'Combine' runs on bio-power and Harris's 'Silence of the Lambs' exposes a society that is no less species-centered than it is sexist, then perhaps the time has come to re-read fictions we thought we knew well. Salah el Moncef's systems-based approach has the potential to dislodge American literature from provincial moorings toward a more global context, whether or not American authors want to go there. This un-placed, atopian literature emerges as both a cognitive resource and a counternarrative, an imaginary alternative to the narrative of the industrial system with its national boundaries, representational structures, and linear spaces of straight reproduction. Postmodern theory may have reached its atopian limits, but in Moncef's hands theory can still open out into the wider field of contemporary fiction rather than closing in on a few canonical works. (Joe Tabbi)
This is the best study of subjectivity, postmodernity and American fiction I have read. My understanding of all three has been enriched by Moncef's very sophisticated work. (Stephen Watt)