Download or read book John Barth and Postmodernism written by Berndt Clavier and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Barth's eminence as a postmodernist is indisputable. However, much of the criticism dealing with his work is prompted by his own theories of «exhaustion» and subsequent «replenishment, » leaving his writing relatively untouched by theories of postmodernism in general. This book changes that by focusing on the relationship between Barth's aesthetic and the ideology critique of the historical avant-gardes, which were the first to mobilize art against itself and its institutional practices and demands. Examining Barth's metafictional parodies in the light of theories of space and subjectivity, Clavier engages the question of ideology critique in postmodernism by offering the montage as a possible model for understanding Barth's fiction. In such a light, postmodernism may well be perceived as a mimesis of reality, particularly a recognition of the collective nature of self and the world.
Download or read book Narrating Postmodern Time and Space written by Joseph Francese and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Morrison, Doctorow, and Tabucchi vary in their stylisitic responses to these changes, their narratives propose a collective recovery of the past into a future-oriented present and serve as examples of how literature can intervene in history, rather than merely reflecting and acquiescing to it.
Download or read book The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism written by Steven D. Scott and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game provides limits, boundaries, and borders to play, thereby both limiting and, paradoxically, enabling meaningful play. This study does not claim that literature is a game in the strong sense, it chooses instead to concentrate on the gamelike shape - the "gamefulness" - that literary postmodernism assumes.
Download or read book The Friday Book written by John Barth and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...The Friday Book was the first work of nonfiction by novelist John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Chimera. Taking its title from the day of the week Barth would devote to nonfiction, the three dozen essays discuss a wide range of topics from the blue crabs of Barth's beloved Chesapeake Bay to weighty literary subjects such as Borges, Homer, and semiotics..."--www.amazon.com.
Download or read book Lost in the Funhouse written by John Barth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction exploring themes of purpose and the meaning of existence. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"--printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Mobius strip--to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do. Highlights include the Homerian story-wthin-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad,' and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence. Together, their stories form a kaleidescope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.
Download or read book Chimera written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called "stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths’ relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, "There’s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.”
Download or read book International Postmodernism written by Johannes Willem Bertens and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world. Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation. This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.
Download or read book John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance written by Patricia Tobin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the sixties and seventies, the fictional "reinventions" of john Barth, along with his misread and influential essay 'The Literature of Exhaustion," established the comic novelist as a leading practitioner and theorist of what was then coming to be called postmodern literature. In more recent years, however, Barth's reputation has been called into question within the ongoing critical debate over the criterion of "originality" and the status of literary repetition, imitation, and parody. In her spirited defense of Barth, Patricia Tobin employs Harold Bloom's theory of belatedness to confront and explode this issue. For Bloom, the later the artist the greater the burden of the past against which he must rebel and the more hopeless his task. However, Tobin argues Barth revels in his belatedness and celebrates the opportunity to survey a rich literary past and to bring back to life its dead forms, genres, and styles by completing, fulfilling, and "exhausting" them. Not a retrospective and negative anxiety of influence, then, but a wholly prospective and positive anxiety of continuance has propelled Barth through a distinguished career. Throughout, Tobin elaborates the conjunctions and disjunctions between Bloom and Barth with surprising results. Most notable, perhaps, is her examination of how Bloom's model of a "map of misreading" helps to elucidate, and even predict, the ways in which Barth sets each new novel in antithetical relation to the one before. Along the way, much is said about modernism and postmodernism, repetition and difference, and what it means poetically and willfully to intend a career. John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance will be of interest to scholars of American fiction and critical theory.
Download or read book Cease Firing written by Mary Johnston and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Coming Soon written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older, retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young, aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers navigate, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism.
Download or read book The Sot Weed Factor written by John Barth and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy -is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late 17th century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists - Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale -revealed to us in the "secret" journals of Capt. John Smith - that anyone has ever dared to tell." —Time Magazine
Download or read book John Barth written by Heide Ziegler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Barth represents most completely what has been termed postmodernism, not because his work comprises more postmodernist features than other contemporary writers but because, for Barth, "life" and "art" are two sides of the same coin. In this brief study, first published in 1987, Heide Ziegler examines all Barth's novels. She argues that each pair of novels first "exhausts" and then "replenishes" those literary genres that hinge on a particular world view: the existentialist novel, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, or the realistic novel. Through the division of labour between character and author Barth manages to develop a new mode of literary parody which projects itself beyond the mocked literary model and even self-parody into the realm of future fiction. This book is ideal for students of literature and postmodern studies.
Download or read book Every Third Thought written by John Barth and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Barth stays true to form in Every Third Thought, written from the perspective of a character Barth introduced in his short story collection The Development. George I. Newett and his wife Amanda Todd lived in the gated community of Heron Bay Estates until its destruction by a fluke tornado. This event, Newett notes, occurred on the 77th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, a detail that would appear insignificant if it were not for several subsequent events. The stress of the tornado's devastation prompts the Newett–Todds to depart on a European vacation, during which George suffers a fall on none other than his 77th birthday, the first day of autumn (or more cryptically, fall). Following this coincidence, George experiences the first of what is to become five serial visions, each appearing to him on the first day of the ensuing seasons, and each corresponding to a pivotal event in that season of his life. As the novel unfolds, so do these uncanny coincidences, and it is clear that, as ever, Barth possesses an unmatched talent in balancing his characteristic style and wit with vivid, page–turning storytelling.
Download or read book Death in the Funhouse written by Alan Lindsay and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contrast to recent attempts to distinguish postmodernism from poststructuralism, Death in the FUNhouse finds deep complicity between the two discourses. This book looks comprehensively at the middle and late texts of John Barth to demonstrate the complexity of the postmodern author - and the never-ending quest for pleasure.
Download or read book From Modernism to Postmodernism written by Gerhard Hoffmann and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This systemic study discusses in its historical, cultural and aesthetic context the postmodern American novel between the years of 1960 and 1980. A general overview of the various definitions of postmodernism in philosophy, cultural theory and aesthetics provides the framework for the inquiry into more specific problems, such as: the broadening of aesthetics, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the transformation of the artistic tradition, the interdependence between modernism and postmodernism, and the change in the aesthetics of fiction. Other topics addressed here include: situationalism, montage, the ordinary and the fantastic, the subject and the character, the imagination, comic modes, and the future of the postmodern strategies. The authors whose fiction is treated in some detail under the various aspects thematized are John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Download or read book Hiding Man written by Tracy Daugherty and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at the New Yorker, publishing more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by clerical error, and "A Shower of Gold," in which a sculptor agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? He had a dynamic relationship with his father that influenced much of his fiction. He worked as an editor, a designer, a curator, a news reporter, and a teacher. He was at the forefront of literary Greenwich Village which saw him develop lasting friendships with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, and Norman Mailer. Married four times, he had a volatile private life. He died of cancer in 1989. The recipient of many prestigious literary awards, he is best remembered for the classic novels Snow White, The Dead Father, and many short stories, all of which remain in print today. Hiding Man is the first biography of Donald Barthelme, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Download or read book The Literature of Replenishment written by John Barth and published by . This book was released on 1982-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
