Raymond Federman, writer, UB professor emeritus
Story tools:
Share this story:
May 15, 1928—Oct. 6, 2009
Raymond Federman, a major figure in 20th century avant-garde literature and professor emeritus at the University at Buffalo, where he influenced scores of students, died Tuesday in San Diego after a struggle with cancer. He was 81.
Mr. Federman, a close friend of avant-garde giant Samuel Beckett (“He calls me Ray, I call him Sam,” he told his students), wrote in a style that broke down traditional prose conventions. One of his best-known works, the 1971 novel “Double or Nothing,” features words arranged to resemble images or suggest repeating themes.
“Federman does not invent characters,” he told an interviewer. “The notion of character is obsolete for him. Federman invents voices—only voices.”
Born in Montrouge, France, he was hidden in a closet by his mother when Nazis swept through his town rounding up Jews in World War II and never saw his family again. He escaped and eventually came to the United States in 1947.
Living at first in Detroit, he contemplated becoming a jazz musician but decided on a literary career while in the Army with the 82nd Airborne Division. He was deployed in Korea and Japan during the Korean War.
He went to Columbia University on the GI Bill, graduating summa cum laude and earned a doctorate from UCLA, doing his doctoral dissertation on Beckett. He was married to the former Erica Hubscher in 1960.
He taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, coming to UB in 1964. He was in the French department until 1973, when he became a fiction writer, critic and scholar in the English department and Comparative Literature Program. In 1990, he was named a SUNY Distinguished Professor and was appointed to the Melodia
E. Jones Chair of Literature in 1994. He retired in 1999.
In addition to his novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages, he published four books of poetry, several books of criticism and numerous articles and essays.
One of his 1960s essays, “Surfiction,” set the standard for literary avant-garde criticism.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and spent a year in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a Fulbright fellow; and in Berlin in 1989-90 under auspices of the Berlin Artist Program. He also lectured extensively abroad for the U. S. Information Agency.
He was a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in 1985 and was awarded Les Palmes Academiques by the French government in 1995. His 80th year was celebrated by Buffalo’s literary community last October with a series of special events, recollections and readings.
In retirement in San Diego, he wrote more than ever, publishing a flurry of novels, poems and essays. He maintained a lively and whimsical blog, where in recent months he reflected on death, notably in a dialogue about his obituary with his daughter Simone, in a reflection on rereading Beckett’s “Malone’s Death” and in poems.
—Dale Anderson
Published: October 08, 2009, 12:30 am