SOURCE: "Robert Coover," in his American Self-Conscious Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s: Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Ronald Sukenick, Poznan, 1986, pp. 64-98.

In the following excerpt, Semrau cites The Origin of the Brunists, The Public Burning, and The Universal Baseball Association as examples of Coover's "musicalization of literature."

Robert Coover ranks unquestionably among the most versatile contemporary authors. A "literary polyglot," as one critic has called him, he has tried his hand at poetry and translation, has written a collection of plays, a book of short stories and many uncollected short fictions, six novellas (two of them in the form of film-scripts), and three novels ranging from the mere two-hundred-page The Universal Baseball Association—through the solid, four hundred pages long The Origin of the Brunists—to the truly encyclopedic The Public Burning.

While Barthelme foregrounds artifice in his writing basically through miniaturization, contraction and linguistic terseness, Coover...