Лоуренс Маккаффери: Америкалық әдебиет сыншысы және жазушының өмірбаяны

American author and professor
Lawrence F. McCaffery Jr. (born May 13, 1946) is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre.

McCaffery was born in 1946 in Dallas, Texas. He received his PhD in 1975, with a dissertation on the works of Robert Coover. The second was Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (with Tom LeClair), which helped identify the major innovative authors associated with postmodernism. McCaffery went on to publish three additional collections of interviews with contemporary authors: Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s with Sinda Gregory (1986), Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Authors (1990), and Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors (1995). McCaffery explains that the interviews within these works begin orally, and, after being transcribed from tape and edited by both McCaffery and the interviewee, become "collaborative texts based on an actual conversation rather than a direct rendering of that conversation". During his career as Professor at SDSU, McCaffery played a large role as editor of literary journals. In 1983, McCaffery arranged to have the literary journal, Fiction International move to SDSU from New York City, where it had been edited and published by Joe David Bellamy since 1973. McCaffery served as co editor of FI with Harold Jaffe for the next decade, during which it became one of the leading publishers of radically innovative, politically charged fiction. His work Storming the Reality Studio placed science fiction and cyberpunk within the field of postmodern studies. an anthology featuring the fictional work of authors such as William Gibson, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, and Harold Jaffe, as well as non fiction by writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. Other notable anthologies are Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993) and After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology (1997).

McCaffery is briefly mentioned in Raymond Federman's novel The Twofold Vibration, and is mentioned throughout William T. Vollmann's book Imperial. He has also been quoted in an article in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace's legacy. He created a theory of media/visual studies about the relation between memory, narrative, and sexuality called "Avant Porn," as claimed in his introduction to Michael Hemmingson's 2000 anthology, WTF: The Avant Porn Anthology. a true account. McCaffery is also author of the popular best of list The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English Language Books of Fiction. This list was written in response to Modern Library 100 Best Novels list (1999), which McCaffery saw as "being way, way out of touch with the nature and significance of 20th century fiction".

After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. NY: Penguin Books, 1997. Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation. Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1993. Storming the Reality Studio Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader with co editor Michael Hemmingson (2004)