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Although unmistakably literary, Robert Coover's work has from the first mixed fiction with philosophical reflections and meditations, making it difficult for the reader to find a critical stance. More than an interrogation on 'the fictionmaking process,'? metafiction in this light can be read as a way of re-assessing our reading habits. What is at stake is how the reader can construct meaning from texts which constantly shift perspectives from the comic to the gruesome, from pornography to philosophy and so on, virtually in the same breath, asking us to reposition ourselves and preventing us from adopting a global, unifying approach. Hence a redefinition of what we hold as 'critical distance'? or even criticism becomes necessary as the texts strive to confront, intimately and violently, their writing with a never-ending, constantly-renewed reading process, a process that can be defined both from a literary and a philosophical viewpoint as being, just as the texts are, 'in the making.'?