Larry McCaffery


Lawrence F. "Larry" McCaffery Jr. is an America 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.

Biography

McCaffery was born in 1946 in Dallas, Texas. He received his PhD in 1975, with a dissertation on the works of Robert Coover. He joined the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University in 1976. He taught in SDSU's English Department until retiring in 2010. During his career as a professor, McCaffery took up visiting professorships at University of Nice, University of California, San Diego, Deep Springs College, Seikei University in Tokyo, Japan and was a Fulbright Lecturer at Beijing Foreign Studies University during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He and his wife currently reside in Borrego Springs, California.

Literary career

In 1983, McCaffery published two books in the field of postmodern literary studies. The first was The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Coover, Gass, and Barthelme, which explored the emergence of the "meta-impulse" as one of the defining features of postmodern aesthetics. The second was Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, 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, Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Authors, and Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. 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". These works established "avant-prof" critic Lance Olsen to dub McCaffery as "Guru of the Interview"
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. Since the early eighties, he has also been an editor of , and executive editor of . McCaffery has guest-edited several special issues of other literary magazines, including Mississippi Review's landmark "Cyberpunk Issue.
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 and After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology''.

Awards and honors

Books of interviews