SOURCE: Miguel-Alfonso, Ricardo. “Mimesis and Self-Consciousness in Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association.” Critique 37, no. 2 (winter 1996): 92–107.

In the following essay, Miguel-Alfonso examines Coover's movement from mimetic representation toward self-conscious awareness in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., drawing attention to the transformation of meaning and reality in the novel.

After The Origin of the Brunists, Coover's interest in the examination of cultural paradigms became “limited” to the categories of fiction-making. In many of the short stories collected in Pricksongs and Descants and in his novel The Universal Baseball Association, he focuses on the interchange between the different components and strata of fictional creations. Authorial control, referentiality, the relationship between author and reader, and other elements are now subject to examination and undergo certain transformations that easily can be associated with the distinctive attitude of formal exploration of contemporary fiction. The Universal Baseball Association, however, deals...