The Location of “The Author” in John Barth's LETTERS
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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. -
The Enchanted Storyteller: John Barth and the Magic of Scheherazade Moosavi Majd, Maryam; Elahipanah, Nooshin
www.ssoar.info The enchanted storyteller: John Barth and the magic of Scheherazade Moosavi Majd, Maryam; Elahipanah, Nooshin Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Moosavi Majd, M., & Elahipanah, N. (2015). The enchanted storyteller: John Barth and the magic of Scheherazade. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 59, 65-75. https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ ILSHS.59.65 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zur This document is made available under a CC BY Licence Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden (Attribution). For more Information see: Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2015-09-11 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 59, pp 65-75 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.59.65 © 2015 SciPress Ltd., Switzerland The Enchanted Storyteller: John Barth and the Magic of Scheherazade Maryam Moosavi Majda *, Nooshin Elahipanahb Foreign Languages Faculty, Semnan University, Iran E-mail address: *[email protected], [email protected] Keywords: John Barth, Scheherazade, Narrative, Frame tale, Embedding ABSTRACT. During the fifties he was considered to be an existentialist, and absurdist and later a Black Humorist, yet, John Barth proved that he would never subscribe to any specific theory and would make his own world of/about fiction by himself. A traditional postmodernist as some of the critics calls him; he was obsessed with Scheherazade the narrator of the Thousand and one Nights and her art of storytelling. -
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. -
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. -
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). -
ANALYSIS Giles Goat-Boy (1966) John Barth
ANALYSIS Giles Goat-Boy (1966) John Barth (1930- ) “In the metaphoric world called the University, control is held by a computer, WESAC [WESCAC], which is able to run itself and to tyrannize people, for it has the ability to subject them to a radiating and disintegrating force, that is, to EAT them, an acronym for its power of ‘Electroencephalic Amplification and Transaction.’ WESAC is so out of hand that one of its developers, Max Spielman, believes it can only be controlled through reprogramming by a Grand Tutor, a prophet, who will bring a ‘New Syllabus,’ that is, a new philosophy. For this role and this purpose he selects George Giles, whom he had raised among goats as a goat, though he was actually a human found as an infant in the tapelift of WESAC. In his undertaking George has to contend with a troublemaker, Maurice Stoker, who alone fully understands the operation of WESAC, and with a minor poet, Harold Bray, who contends that he is a Grand Tutor. George enters the computer to destroy it, and learns to confound WESAC by answering its questions through paradoxes that paralyze the machine. When George emerges, authorities eager to put WESAC back into operation seize him and send him back to the animal site of his boyhood, for he is now the University’s scapegoat.” James D. Hart The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 5th edition (Oxford 1941-83) 282 “It is not, I hasten to say, a merely blasphemous work of empty nihilism, though some reviewers have reacted as if it were. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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).