DOCSLIB.ORG

Speaking of Myth. an Interview with John Barth

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Speaking of Myth. an Interview with John Barth SPEAKING OF MYTH. AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN BARTH CRISTINA GARRIGÓS GONZÁLEZ Universidad de León John Barth is probably the most important American postmodemist author writing nowadays: The prime maximalist of American Fiction as some critics have called him. Bom in Cambridge, Maryland in 1930, he is the author of ten novéis - The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) or Letters (1980) among them - a series of short fictions {Lost in the Funhouse, 1968^, a volume of novellas (Chimera, 1972), and two collections of non-fiction {The Friday Book, 1984 and Further Fridays, 1995). His works Th? Floating Opera and Lost in the Funhouse were finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, which he won in 1973 mth Chimera. Interviews with Barth usually center around his last book, a work in process or his opinión on Postmodemism, a task to which he dedicated his two seminal essays "The Literature of Exhaustion" and "The Literature of Replenishment". But in this interview, conducted in León during a visit of the author to our country, Barth discusses his relationship with four literary figures, which he has acknowledged as the "four regnant deities in his personal pantheon."^ These icons are in literary-historical order Odysseus, Scheherazade, Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. For him, there is no fifth, yet. These figures have appeared recurrently in his works: as characters, as surrogates for them, and he has discussed widely their relevance in his work in his numerous essays. The admiration of Barth for these mythological icons, "the four compass-points of my narrative imagination" as he calis them, is not half-hazard. It responds to a specific way of conceiving literature, since they have much in common with the postmodemist aesthetics: the motif of the voyage, the search for identity, the myth of the wandering hero, the power of fiction to grant life or to kill, the infinite deferral of the ending, and the relationship between fact and fiction. All these issues are discussed by our author, as well as his conception of narrative creation. In this interview he demonstrates how important universal literature is for him, and how his work is fundamentally intertextual. He speaks of how he leamed to read Don Quixote with Pedro Salinas and of the influence of Jorge Luis Borges in his work. This is an interview where John Barth shows that as an author he is, first and foremost, a reader. Q. After reading your work, I have the impression that there are four characters that keep reappearing all the time: Odysseus, Scheherazade, Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. And I think you said in "The Limits of Imagination" that you considered these four characters to be the four compass points of your narrative imagination. Could you explain what you mean by that and what is the cause of your admiration for these four literary figures? A. You will agree that except for Scheherazade, who comes in into several works, (Scheherazade is with me all the time) the other ones, Odysseus, Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn, they do not appear literally very often in any of the works. And yet, they 1. For instance, Bin Ramke & Donald Revell in "A Conversation with John Barth" in The Bloomsbury Review, October/November 1991. 2. "The Limits of Imagination" Further Fridays. Essays, Lectures and Other Non-Fiction ¡984-1994. Boston: Littie, Brown and Co., 1995. 61. 202 Cristina Garrigós González are the four points in my literary imagination. They are the four deities in my pantheon. There is really no fifth, no other. If you say, if it is your impression, that they, or surrogates for them, appear in some of the novéis, this doesn't surprise me, and it does interest me. For me, as I wrote in "The Limits of Imagination", the images of Odysseus traveling back home, of Scheherazade telling stories to the king to save her neck, of Don Quixote and Santo Panzer wandering through La Manchu or Huckleberry Finn in the Mississippi, are far more powerful than the works that contain them. They have become transcendental icons. This, I guess, is what Leslie Fiedler meant when he said that what stays with you of a work when you have forgotten all the words, indicates its mythopoetic quality. Q. And one of the images that you have retained from The Odyssey is that of Odysseus striving homeward, right? An image that has appeared fi-equently in your work, 1 think. But, why Odysseus? Are you interested in him because of your well-known fascination with navigation? Is it for your interest in wandering myths? How do you read him in The Odyssey, as someone who is eager to go home, back to his loving wife or, on the contrary, as Dante does in the Divine Comedy, as someone eager to travel and to have more knowledge, an adventurer? Or, rather, as both? A. Well, obviously his official motivation is to get home, his official motivation. In one respect, Aeneas is more interesting because Odysseus knows where he has to go: he has to go back to Ithaca, whereas Aeneas has to make his way as he goes. Aeneas has to invent his destination, he has to find it, as well as get there. But is Odysseus really eager to go home? I am reminded of the Spanish proverb in Don Quixote that the road is better than the end, and we know, of course, that he wants to go home, but it takes him a very long time, many years with Circe and so on. It is not like Aeneas with Dido, when the gods have to remind him that he has to go back home: "Come on, come on, there are things to do, let's get out of here". Nobody pushes Odysseus. It is as if destination is destiny. He forgets now and then, not where he is supposed to go, but that he should get along and leave. He has to be reminded not of his identity, but of his identity in the sense that Odysseus is "the one who is supposed to be going home to Ithaca". Nobody can surpass Homer in this last scene when after many years he reaches Ithaca, not by any effort of his own, but in his sleep, as if in a dream. Then the other work starts. Now, for parallel situations in my work. I don't think they appear in The Floating Opera or The End ofthe Road, but we could say that it starts with The Sot-Weed Factor, because of the difñcuh voyage and the search for his [the protagonist's: Ebenezer Cook] real identity. He is officially a poet, but he isn't a poet. He has to leam it the hard way: he has to leam how to become a poet, and his voyage is one ñill of tríbulations. It is a literal voyage, but it is also a figurative voyage. Like Odysseus, and like the traditional mythical wandering héroes, he has to lose everything, including his identity, in order to arrive to his real destination. In Giles Goat Boy, this become much more problematic. In fact, Cristina, as you may know, it was some book-reviewer, some critic writing about The Sot-Weed Factor, who said that the author had clearly been heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And I had not read it!!!! Then I went on and read it. This introduces the problem of self-consciousness; of handling that material once that you know that this is mythical material. Then I approached it without the innocence that I had in Speaking ofMyth. An interview with John Barth 203 The Sot-Weed Factor, where I had a quite innocent approach: I wasn't even aware of Odysseus, Joseph Campbell, or a wandering hero. That interested me, because that's where a kind of postmodemism begins to enter the room. It was interesting to recycle that material again in Giles Goat Boy in a perfectly self- conscious way, and see whether it still could be made in a sufficiently reliable way. Borges would not approve that. 1 spoke to Borges, he had not read any of my novéis; 1 didn't expect him to read any of my novéis. He didn't like to read novéis. Giles Goat Boy is, as you may know, my least favorite novel, but I would agree with Borges that it is a novel that would be better to talk about in ten minutes of conversation than write a story with foomotes to it. Then in the subsequent books the myth appears more recurrently. Q. You even have an Odysseus character that appears in The Tidewater Tales. A. Yes, I figured that it was time, that after all these surrogates for him, why don't 1 bring the chap on stage? 1 did the same with Scheherazade and Huckleberry Finn, although Huckieberry Finn has been less important for me. He is less rich an archetype for me. Scheherazade is really my favorite one. She is the one who tells the story, and she is as good as her next story is. It is not enough to have told two hundred and thirty seven stories, if she dees not tell a good story then her neck.... Q. You seem to be interested in oriental myths, in the roots of storytelling. How about Simbad the Sailor? In the Last Voyage ofSomebody the Sailor you seem to combine the myth of Odysseus (the wandering hero) with the Arab tradition of The One Thousand and One Nights. A.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Iceberg and Its Minimalist Implications in Raymond Carver's Fiction
    Sinking the Titanic: The Iceberg and its Minimalist Implications In Raymond Carver's Fiction Senior Paper Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with A Major in Literature at The University of North Carolina at Asheville Spring 2006 By John Mozley Thesis Reader Deborah James Thesis Advisor Cynn Chadwick Mozley 1 When Raymond Carver died in 1988 of lung cancer, Robert Gotlieb, the then editor of The New Yorker, stated, "America just lost the writer it could least afford to lose" (Max 36). In Carver's mere twenty-year publishing career, he garnered such titles as "the American Chekhov" (London Times), "the most imitated American writer since Hemingway" (Nesset 2), and "as successful as a short story writer in America can be" (Meyer 239). Carver's stories won the O. Henry Award three consecutive years, he was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977 for Will You Please Be Quiet Please?. won two NBA awards for fiction, received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the "Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters" (Saltzman 3), and his collection of stories, Cathedral was nominated for both National Book Critics Circle award and a Pulitzer Prize (Saltzman 3). Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington where his father worked in the sawmill. At twenty years old, Carver was married to his high school sweetheart, Maryanne, and had two children (Saltzman 1). Plagued by debt and escalating alcoholism, the Carvers moved to California where Raymond "worked a series of low-paying jobs, including deliveryman, gas station attendant and hospital janitor, while his wife waited tables and sold door to door" (1), his jobs also included "sawmill worker.
    [Show full text]
  • The Location of “The Author” in John Barth's LETTERS
    The Author’s Metamorphosis: The Location of “the Author” in John Barth’s LETTERS Naoto KOJIMA Abstract 1979 年に発表されたジョン・バースの浩瀚な小説『レターズ』は、トマス・ピンチョ ンの『重力の虹』と並び、アメリカ文学におけるポストモダン小説の極点として考えら れている。『レターズ』をリアリズムと（ポスト）モダニズム的言語実験との綜合を試 みる小説とする議論を踏まえながら、この論文は、それ以前のバース作品に特徴的な自 己言及的メタフィクションが問題とした、「作者」の位置についての矛盾との関係にお いて『レターズ』の達成を捉える。そしてそのメタフィクションの矛盾からの脱却が、 小説の構造的なレベルだけでなく物語内容のレベルにおいても、作中に登場する「作者」 の正体を巡る謎解きのプロットとして表れていることを示す。手紙の書き手の一人であ る「作者」こそが、物語中での不在の息子ヘンリー・バーリンゲイム７世にほかならず、 その両者がテクストの内部と外部を行き来する作者の「変身」によって特徴づけられて いるのである。従来の研究ではこの小説における「作者」の正体（と小説の構造との関 係）を十分に突き止められてはおらず、その点でこの『レターズ』論は一つの新たな作 品解釈の提示であり、同時に、小説における「作者」の位置づけを巡る考察でもある。 Key Words: author, metafiction, presence/absence, realism, postmodernism 1. Introduction John Barth is a highly self-conscious writer. From the beginning of his career, his fiction has shown a distinctive self-referential nature. In his first novel, The Floating Opera, Todd Andrews mourns the dilemma of writing his own story in a Tristram Shandy-like manner: “Good heavens, how does one write a novel! I mean, how can anybody stick to the story, if he’s at all sensitive to the significances of things?…[E]very new sentence I set down is full of figures and implications that I’d love nothing better than to chase to their dens with you, but such chasing would involve new figures and new chases, so that I’m sure we’d never get the story started, much less ended, if I let my inclinations run unleashed” (2). He realizes that it is impossible to tell the story completely. Telling a story holds an inevitable difference between the telling and the told. - 251 - His self-reflective fictions derive from this acknowledgement of painful resignation. In his career as a writer, Barth’s orientation toward a self-referential structure is inextricably interwoven with his failed effort to write an autobiographical novel.
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophy and the Future of Fiction
    Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991) Volume 1 Issue 2 Syracuse Scholar Fall 1980 Article 3 1980 Philosophy and the Future of Fiction William Gass Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/suscholar Recommended Citation Gass, William (1980) "Philosophy and the Future of Fiction," Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991): Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. Available at: https://surface.syr.edu/suscholar/vol1/iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991) by an authorized editor of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Gass: Philosophy and the Future of Fiction Philosophy and the Future of Fiction William Gass "Philosophy and the Future of Fiction" I would like to talk about philosophy and the development of was the first lecture of the annual the novel and to say something about the direction in which I University Lecture Series at Syracuse University. It was presented by William think the novel will go as it becomes increasingly self-conscious Gass at Grant Auditorium on October and an object of interest to philosophers. These are extra­ 25, 1979. The present version has been somewhat modified for purposes of ordinary changes for the novel. When I was in graduate school, publication in Syracuse Scholar. philosophers only read Dostoevski, and indeed only read The William Gass received his Ph.D. in Brothers Karamazov, and indeed only read about Ivan. They philosophy from Cornell University and did this to furnish very trivial and commonplace philosophical is now the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities examples.
    [Show full text]
  • Heide Ziegler
    Heide Ziegler John Barth: Ironischer Repräsentant der .Postmoderne' John Barth ist einer der bedeutendsten Vertreter der literarischen ,Postmoderne'. Der Ausdruck ,Postmoderne' hat sich nicht unwesent­ hch an seinem Werk entwickelt und diesem umgekehrt repr'.isentativen Charakter verliehen. Die Suche nach einer Konstante in Barths sich wan­ delnden intellektuellen Positionen und emotionalen Dispositionen zwischen 1955, dem Jahr als er seine ersten beiden Romane schrieb, und 1984, dem Jahr seiner bislang letzten Publikation, dürfte somit einer Suche nach dem potentiellen Kern dieses ambivalenten, sowohl experiment- als auch traditionsorientierten Zweigs der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Literatur gleichkommen; und der Facettenreichtum von Barths Obsessionen - Grenzbestimmungen zwischen Imagination und Wirklichkeit, Geschichte und Mythos, Literatur und Gesellschaft - ist umgekehrt das Ergebnis der diesem Kern inhärenten Anregungsener­ gie. Immer wenn sich daher Barth die Frage stellt, was die .Postmoderne' eigentlich sei, sucht er in bewußtem Narzißmus das objektive Korrelat seiner selbst in einem vielfältig gebrochenen allgemeinen Spiegelbild. Barth definiert die Anfangs- und vorläufige Endphase seiner eige­ nen literarischen Entwicklung in zwei komplementären theoretischen Abhandlungen. Die Ausgangsposition beschreibt er in "The Litera­ ture of Exhaustion" (1967), einer inzwischen zu einem Manifest der ,Postmoderne' gewordenen Hommage a Jorge Luis Borges. Barth be­ wundert Borges, denn .. his artistlc vlctOry. if you Iike. is that he con­ fronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to ac­ complish new human work". I Ähnlich sucht Barth selbst in The Sot­ Weed Factor (1960) und Gi/es Goat-Boy (1966) die Sterilität histo­ rischer, beziehungsweise metaphysischer Klischees genau durch deren exuberanten Einsatz ironisch zu entlarven und zugleich zu transzendieren. Barths vorläufige theoretische Endposition dagegen findet sich in "The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction" (1980).
    [Show full text]
  • AMERICAN LITERARY MINIMALISM by ROBERT CHARLES
    AMERICAN LITERARY MINIMALISM by ROBERT CHARLES CLARK (Under the Direction of James Nagel) ABSTRACT American Literary Minimalism stands as an important yet misunderstood stylistic movement. It is an extension of aesthetics established by a diverse group of authors active in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that includes Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. Works within the tradition reflect several qualities: the prose is “spare” and “clean”; important plot details are often omitted or left out; practitioners tend to excise material during the editing process; and stories tend to be about “common people” as opposed to the powerful and aristocratic. While these descriptors and the many others that have been posited over the years are in some ways helpful, the mode remains poorly defined. The core idea that differentiates American Minimalism from other movements is that prose and poetry should be extremely efficient, allusive, and implicative. The language in this type of fiction tends to be simple and direct. Narrators do not often use ornate adjectives and rarely offer effusive descriptions of scenery or extensive detail about characters’ backgrounds. Because authors tend to use few words, each is invested with a heightened sense of interpretive significance. Allusion and implication by omission are often employed as a means to compensate for limited exposition, to add depth to stories that on the surface may seem superficial or incomplete. Despite being scattered among eleven decades, American Minimalists share a common aesthetic. They were not so much enamored with the idea that “less is more” but that it is possible to write compact prose that still achieves depth of setting, characterization, and plot without including long passages of exposition.
    [Show full text]
  • The Literature of Exhausted Possibility: the Entanglement of Postmodern Fiction
    AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume3, Number2.May 2019 Pp. 14-21 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol3no2.2 The Literature of Exhausted Possibility: The Entanglement of Postmodern Fiction Nariman LARBI Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University of Mostaganem, Algeria Abstract: Postmodern literature, fiction in particular, is, according to Barth (1984), a literature of exhausted possibility due to its entangled thematic and technical approach which defies the conventional modern fictional form. It reflects the zeitgeist or the spirit of postmodernism which is regarded as a revaluation of the modern enterprise; an enterprise that embodies universality and coherence. The present research paper attempts to address the recurrent thematic element that postmodern fiction revolves around: that of the presence of the historiographic element in postmodern fiction which reflects in itself the evaluation of past history; such a fictional preoccupation reflects the major postmodern philosophers’ and thinkers’ concerns, such as those of Lyotard and Baudrillard, on the impossibility for the existence of a universal coherent history. This criterion is one amongst other criteria that justify the exhaustion of postmodern fiction. Keywords: John Barth, Postmodern Fiction, Postmodernism, Post-historicism, Historiographic Metafiction, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard Cites as: LARBI, N. (2019). The Literature of Exhausted Possibility: The Entanglement of Postmodern Fiction. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies, 3 (2)14-21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol3no2.2 Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 14 ISSN: 2550-1542 |www.awej-tls.org AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies Volume, 3 Number 2. May 2019 The Literature of Exhausted Possibility: The Entanglement of Postmodern LARBI Introduction Postmodernism is essentially that movement which grew out of a reaction against modernism, the roots of which find their impetus in the revolutionary Age of Enlightenment.
    [Show full text]
  • It 1 the Postwar Amercan Novel
    IT 1 THE POSTWAR AMERCAN NOVEL cture Objectives The post Second World War American Novel The American Novel since the Twenties The Second World War and its impact on America America in the postwar years The postwar American Novel Saul Bellow Norman Mailor: War as a Civilizational Value John Barth:The European Inspiration John Barth: The novelistic Vision Summing Up References Key words Questions Suggested Readings 1.0 1 OBJECTIVES 1.1 1 THE POST SECOND WORLD WAR AMERICAN I NOVEL "The Literature of Exhaustion", John Barth sums up the iterature of exhaustion. The genre is minimally American, is largely Euro-American. The effective'American the emergence of America as a cultural center for many rs enabled America to experience the war n of the American novel is simply its cultural daries. The catastrophe of the war brought a the modernist values of liberal individualism . These y strong after the first world war with the enthusiastic to the European modernism. There was disillusionment that was more in the nature of a concern for the of human values in the war. The first world war did not bring in cynicism intensified humanist concerns whereas the second which was a sheer holocaust made humanist convictions almost 1 in the aftermath of the war presented a new ambience vastly different fiom that of the predecessors. Saul Bellow, ailor, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth reshaped the American novel in The Floating Opera the postwar years. Theirs was a renaissance necessitated by the postwar cultural perspectives. Together, they heralded a new phase in the American fiction, a phase that became markedly clear not only in their writings but also among the novelists who came into prominence during the sixties and the subsequent decades.
    [Show full text]
  • John Barth, Ebenezer Cooke, the Literature Of
    JOHN BARTH, EBENEZER COOKE, AND THE LITERATURE OF EXHAUSTION BY Carolyn W. Brumbaugh Thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English APPROVED: J~mes'L.,M. West III, Director Rachel A. Fordy'-4 Robert Hazel Hilbert H. Campbell July, 1977 Blacksburg, Virginia ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Dr. James L. W. West III for his careful and thorough assistance with this thesis. My other readers, Professors Rachel Fordyce and Robert Hazel, were also quite helpful. My gratitude also goes to who has shared his enthusiasm for and ideas about John Barth with me. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Acknowledgments . ii Table of Contents • iii Preface 1 Chapter I: Cooke, Barth, and the Plot of The Sot-Weed Factor 2 Chapter II: John Barth and the Literature of Exhaustion • . • . 31 Chapter III: Barth, Cooke, and the Literature of Exhaustion 46 Bibliography: List of Works Consulted • . 64 Vita 68 iii Preface Current predictions that the novel is dying are troublesome to contemporary authors who write in that genre. For one contemporary novelist, John Barth, there are two possible responses to this dilemma: To ignore it completely or confront it directly. Barth chooses the second alternative. He feels that the contemporary writer must be aware of the history of his genre without becoming paralyzed by this knowledge. With this history in mind, the author must then write tech- nically up-to-date novels. At the same time, however, the novelist must continue to treat issues of the human heart.
    [Show full text]
  • 225 the COMPLEX GAME of JOHN BARTH's LETTERS Raluca
    ACADEMIA DE STUDII ECONOMICE BUCURE ŞTI Sesiunea Interna ţional ă de Comunic ări Ştiin ţifice Youth on the move. Teaching languages for international study and career-building Bucure şti, 13-14 mai 2011 THE COMPLEX GAME OF JOHN BARTH’S LETTERS Raluca ŞERBAN, Mihai ŞERBAN The Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest Abstract: A brilliant instance of parody put to work, John Barth’s novel LETTERS targets a 19 th century novelistic sub-genre that was pretty influential at the time, although it was subsequently felt as highly artificial and abandoned. Moreover, the author subtly plays with his readers from a character position, as the novel exhibits one of the most salient forms of self-fictionalization (via the literary technique la mise-en-abyme): the writer projected in the fictional text, with his entire identity, as one of the characters, who are deliberately placed on the same ontological level with him. In this essay, these aspects shall be analyzed in more detail. Key-words: self-fictionalization, parody, mise-en-abyme, influence Another instance of parody put to work, the novel LETTERS targets a 19 th century novelistic sub-genre that was pretty influential at the time, although it was subsequently felt as highly artificial and abandoned. The other important thread that unites Barth’s novels, the use of the literary technique la mise-en-abyme , is also present. This time, the author more subtly plays with us from a character position, as the novel exhibits one of the most salient forms of self-fictionalization: the writer projected in the fictional text, with his entire identity, as a main character.
    [Show full text]
  • Ana-Maria DELIU Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania [email protected]
    Ana-Maria DELIU Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania [email protected] TRANSGRESSIVE METAFICTION: DECONSTRUCTING WORLDS IN JOYCE’S ULYSSES AND BARTH’S LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE Abstract: The question “to what degree does metafiction construct and deconstruct worlds” generates a conceptual and paradigmatic rethinking of metafiction, based on the theoretical tools of possible worlds theory, especially fictional worlds. More specifically, to what degree does metafiction succeed in constructing a verisimilar possible world or, on the contrary, undress it of materiality and illusion of reality, turning rather to itself as a text (metafiction is self-conscious, auto-referential fiction, drawing attention to its mechanisms and its status as an artifact while a possible world is a world which is credible, ontologically different from ours only in being non-actualised). Moreover, in metafictions like James Joyce‟s Ulysses, or John Barth‟s Lost in the funhouse, deconstructing worlds means not only de-materialising worlds, turning to form in an extremely overt way, and moving from mimesis of product to mimesis of process, but also the French deconstruction praxis of denouncing structuralist dichotomy signified-signifier, thus loosing oneself in a network of signifiers which ultimately destroy the metaphysics of the signified. After poststructuralism murders the author, the latter revives as a practical fiction in a textual world of indecidables. Key words: fiction theory, transgressive metafiction, deconstruction, practical fiction, James Joyce, John Barth Dematerialisation and Deconstruction Firstly, I would like to mention that I wrote this study in relationship with another one published in the first issue of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory (50-60).
    [Show full text]
  • Fiction Award Winners 2019
    1989: Spartina by John Casey 2016: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen National Book 1988: Paris Trout by Pete Dexter 2015: All the Light We Cannot See by A. Doerr 1987: Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann 2014: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Award 1986: World’s Fair by E. L. Doctorow 2013: Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson 1985: White Noise by Don DeLillo 2012: No prize awarded 2011: A Visit from the Goon Squad “Established in 1950, the National Book Award is an 1984: Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist by Jennifer Egan American literary prize administered by the National 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker 2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization.” 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike 2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - from the National Book Foundation website. 1980: Sophie’s Choice by William Styron 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 1979: Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien by Junot Diaz 2018: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez 1978: Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward 1977: The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks 2016: The Underground Railroad by Colson 1976: J.R. by William Gaddis 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Whitehead 1975: Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones 2015: Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson The Hair of Harold Roux 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 2014: Redeployment by Phil Klay by Thomas Williams 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo 2013: Good Lord Bird by James McBride 1974: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 2001: The Amazing Adventures of 2012: Round House by Louise Erdrich 1973: Chimera by John Barth Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon 2011: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward 1972: The Complete Stories 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 2010: Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon by Flannery O’Connor 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham 2009: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann 1971: Mr.
    [Show full text]
  • Lost in the Postmodern Era Henry Shepard University of Southern Mississippi
    The Catalyst Volume 2 | Issue 1 Article 3 2012 Lost in the Postmodern Era Henry Shepard University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: http://aquila.usm.edu/southernmisscatalyst Recommended Citation Shepard, Henry (2012) "Lost in the Postmodern Era," The Catalyst: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 3. DOI: 10.18785/cat.0201.03 Available at: http://aquila.usm.edu/southernmisscatalyst/vol2/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in The aC talyst by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. n John Barth's "Lost in the Fun­ Lost in the Postmodern Era Barth also discusses the I house," a char- need to rediscover conven­ acter named Ambrose Henry Shepard tional devices used in litera­ winds up lost in the ture: "After which, I add on confines of a funhouse, an attraction that is supposed to offer en­ behalf of the rest of us, it might joyment by mixing the uncertain with adventure. 1 However, this be conceivable to rediscover story is not told through conventional means, as the narrator of this validly the artifices of language tale is lost himself. The narrator, while focused on telling the tale and literature - such far-out of Ambrose, is also distracted by the various literary devices and notions as grammar, punctua­ techniques of putting a fictional work together. The narrator's ob­ tion ... even characterization! servation of how the piece is being put together as the work un­ Even plot!" ("Literature of Ex­ folds, or of any type of device that makes the reader aware that he haustion" 3).
    [Show full text]